Comment by crote

You can probably blame the manufacturers and tech press for that.

These were always only intended to be internal designations for very specific technologies, with the devices and cables simply labeled with their actual capabilities. None of the Gen1/Gen2/Gen3 nonsense, simply "10G" / "20G" / "40G".

Unfortunately not everyone got that memo, and once the general population got used to the complicated internal-only designation it became pretty much impossible to use any other term for it.