I was given the impression by my professors that it was a purposeful move, maybe it was just in teaching and not research. I'll defer to you, the actual particle physicist.
I’d also heard something like this during my physics education - you’re not alone apparently. One name was apparently more ‘respectable’ than the other. Lol
heh there's a deep irony here, in a story about "how science communicators [supposedly] ditched the term favoured for capturing the public imagination, in order to instead favour a more descriptive factual term"...
...of which the story itself is an overly neat simplification that has spread by better capturing the imagination of descriptive-minded physics students, in the teachers' own science communicating :)