[andrewingram]

Important to call out here, but thanks to GraphQL’s unfortunate habit of using words which already have established meanings, when a lot of people talk about “cursor-based pagination”, they actually mean keyset pagination and not something that requires a server to maintain a stateful cursor.

I’m guessing this is the meaning the OP was referring to.

[inshadows]

I think it's common to call it cursor regardless of where it's maintained. I agree that it may confuse some people since there are cursors in SQL APIs. But the underlying concept is the same. Keyset does not convey the specific meaning.