"local" can also be a network fileshare. It could also be in a directory that is treated differently than your other checkouts - whether that's something like deployment, sharing over the web, running CI, etc.
"network fileshare" is not local. By the same logic, I can mount S3 bucket over fuse and call it "local". Sure, it will work, but in the context it is just nonsense.
/shrug It's more local than github is. Whether it's a server running in your basement, or the filesystem served by the next rack over in your on-prem datacenter, it doesn't seem unreasonable to refer to it as 'local' in certain contexts, to contrast with remotes that are further away.