We are in agreement here, C++ is not a GCd language. What I (we) claim is that reference counting is a GC, that's it. A language that uses RC 100% would be a GCd language, like python (okay, it does have a tracing GC to collect cycles as well). C++/rust has the necessary language primitives to express reference counting as a library, but that's an optional thing, usually applied only to select few objects. That's a bit like Java can also just allocate a byte buffer and do manual memory management, neither makes a language GCd/manual in and of itself.

The concept of "a garbage-collected language" is not well-defined. There are languages, like Java, Rust, and Python that depend on a garbage collection mechanism, and languages like C, C++ and Zig, which don't. C++ happens to offer a GC in its standard library, however.

That "working developers" use some other terminology is not what matters. What matters is whether the terminology they're using expresses important distinctions or not (and may, in fact, express misconceptions about distinctions). In the case of memory management (as in the case of "transpiles", although there the damage isn't as high), the colloquial terminology is misleading as it is used to hint at distinctions (such as about performance) which are simply not there. E.g. moving GCs are used to avoid the performance overheads of malloc/free, especially in large and/or concurrent programs. This performance overhead that C and C++ suffer from is well known to experienced low-level developers (which is partly why large programs that benefit from moving collectors are relatively rarely written in such languages anymore), but now the terminology is used as a cargo cult, which leads to conclusions that are sometimes the very opposite of what's really going on.