I think the OP was refering to neural network as used with their analogy to their biological counterpart, which has indeed fallen out of fashion several decades

I think the OP was refering to neural network as used with their analogy to their biological counterpart, which has indeed fallen out of fashion several decades ago. I rarely see "neural network" used in recent machine learning/AI literature - most usages are historical, and as you mention, you could fit pretty much anything into neural network if you really want to, so the word is basically meaningless.