Except that's a silly distinction, when you don't yet have any information about what the upper bound is, or any evidence that growth is slowing from its exponential stage. The growth of real-world things clearly has some upper bound, and in saying that it's "exponential" this is understood by all listeners.

Since calling a real-world trend "exponential growth" is always an approximation, pointing out that it's actually "approximately sigmoidal growth, i.e. only approximately exponential until it flattens out sometime in the eventual future" is (you guessed it) a redundant waste of breath.

And to say that pointless pedantry is the same as "mathematical literacy" is even sillier.