The entire reason to call them "Mental Models" is to aid in their communication and discovery. There are many hueristics that are not mental models. There are

The entire reason to call them "Mental Models" is to aid in their communication and discovery. There are many hueristics that are not mental models. There are many things that are frameworks that are not mental models. Labelling something a "mental model" as used in this context serves the purpose to communicate "here is an abstraction with unusually good power-to-weight ratio that you can leverage to aide your thinking/reasoning about situations that meet a given set of criteria". It's actually a very specific thing.