You are conflating the industry term 'metaverse' with Facebooks billions of investments and huge PR push on their 'Metaverse' which has so far been solely Horizon Worlds.
Similarly, despite the obscure industry term predating Facebooks push, it is not a common term, and even techies do not think of Minecraft and other digital worlds as being 'Facebooks Metaverse'.
A company cannot just start using a term and then retroactivly justify their expense based on other external examples.
Note that link would have returned a page saying the article didn't exist prior to Facebook's announcements.
While the term certainly existed prior to Facebook what made it anywhere close to common was Facebook's investment and media coverage which not only resulted in the above article but general use of the term for the first time, see the first small bump and the second overwhelming bump: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
Sometimes a big corporation coming along and taking over a term that was barely ever used happens. When people talk of it having happened you can still take them seriously even if you don't like that the word was co-opted.
You seem to believe that only things financed by Facebook qualify as "metaverse", a concept which existed long before Facebook:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse