Yeah, this is a "GPU" in the sense that it resembles modern GPUs with the graphics parts sliced off. So it's an understandable shorthand to use, but it is a bit misleading.
Terminology on this is confusing - NVIDIA calls their A100 a "GPU" for example but I can't tell if any of the graphics bits like samplers and ROPs are even in that thing - though I did learn it has a hardware JPEG decoder.
It used to. Some time in the mid 2010s it changed to General Processing Unit, driven by things like PhysX, crowdsourced protein crunching efforts like Folding@Home, and particularly the cryptocurrency mining boom.
Now we're in the 2020s and GPUs are all about being Generative Processing Units thanks to the "AI" craze.