I think AI for game NPCs is perfectly valid terminology. The actor senses the surroundings and makes decisions to achieve its goals within the constraints and events of the environment.
I disagree. Hardcoded means you need to change and recompile the entire program. So neither an .env file nor model weights that are loaded at runtime are 'hardcoded'.
I would define it more broadly, "same input == same output, with the same program" and using that definition all computer programs are hardcoded in the end.
There is a gray area, you can consider that even programs that use random() are in the hardcoded category as with the same (semi)random value they will produce the same output. You just need to think of the random value as input, since not all input needs to be user input.
The whole idea behind "hard-coded" and original symbolic AI was that a skilled human deliberately wrote explicit code to define a program's behavior.
Machine learning is the exact opposite of that approach.