For the majority of people without CS background Language == Implementation.
So if the reference implementation is a bare bones interpreter, even though there are JIT and AOT compilers tp choose from, they will say language X is interpreted.
Which in Python's case means many ignore the existence of PyPy, given that the language designers don't want to change the nature of CPython.
PyPy's adoption problem is not that it isn't the reference implementation. It's that it is incompatible with a huge body of Python modules that rely on C extensions. If you're going to lose access to libraries, may as well not make the same exact semantic decisions for a JIT-oriented language implementation that you made for an interpreted implementation.