There’s nothing misleading about it. Shift paddles are pretty standard on cars with automatic gearboxes. The only difference is that outside of sports cars “consumer” gearboxes will usually restrict the range they’ll let you use with semi-automatic shifting and will override that if you redline or bottom out.
It’s completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand: whether the user or the computer initiates the gear change does not change the efficiency of the gearbox.
When manuals are discussed on the internet, it’s the manual clutch which is the central difference, not what’s essentially a firmware feature or lack thereof. That’s what’s mentioned in pretty much every comment other than your nitpicks.
