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Yeah; it's not strictly accurate, but in a similar sense that it's not strictly accurate to call the typical copper Ethernet connector "RJ45", to say that a UDP "connection" occurred, or to say that a modem connects to a "DB-9" serial port.

I suspect the root of the problem is that over time, "proxy" has become strongly associated with application-layer protocols like HTTP, and after that shift it wasn't obvious what to use for something lower-level that encompassed a wider range of protocols/endpoints/conversations. In principle, "tunnel" would probably have been better (and a legible metaphor to boot), but that's just not how things shook out in practice.