That's exactly what I told some colleagues a few years ago when this subject came up. The information itself is propagating through the system. The fact that it relies on cache expiries and pulls is irrelevant to that; it's an implementation detail.
Yeah, it seems like someone heard 'propagation' and assumed a push-based system, then found out that was wrong, which means either they were wrong to assume propagation==push, or 'propagation' was the wrong term.
So instead of re-examining their assumption and I dunno, googling "what does propagation mean" or whatever, they've decided the problem was that ~everyone else is wrong...