It's not a misnomer. Back in the day, I wanted to implement a cache in our software product that used reference counting to update objects and when the object

It's not a misnomer. Back in the day, I wanted to implement a cache in our software product that used reference counting to update objects and when the object went to 0, free it from the cache. Pretty straightforward, no rocket science, but this was also cross-platform including Solaris, HP-UX, etc. This was easy to do on Windows/Intel because they implemented a native CAS at the time (almost 20 years ago now), but the other systems didn't. The only way would be to add a mutex per object, which was a non-starter because it used real kernel memory and resources, so I had to abandon the feature entirely. The above is truly lock-free because it doesn't require any additional resources that have to be tracked or freed.