They are not hiding behind a non sensical term. Distroless is a established term in the container space. Many images are often offered in both "normal" and "distroless" flavor, where distroless is stripped of anything that is not needed to run the application, for example curl and shells etc.
Since distroless are lacking all these tools other techniques needs to be used during troubleshooting and debugging.
I think distroless images are great. Less stuff to patch and smaller images.