[Retra]

If I said "algebra is geometry", you could make the same criticism; it's wrong, because that's not what most people mean by those terms.

But then you see that almost all of the most important mathematical developments in human history make that exact conflation, and that it is all driven by the need to describe human experience in symbolic language... and it does look very deep.

Nobody cares what 'most people' mean. Most people are idiots. Sure, you wouldn't talk like that when you're writing a dictionary, but dictionary writers are not known for making intellectual breakthroughs. That's the difference between description thinking and proscriptive. One allows for creativity.