I don't think it's fair to characterize it as "sloppy" or "clickbait" at all. The author is a game developer, and they use terminology in a way that is common a

I don't think it's fair to characterize it as "sloppy" or "clickbait" at all. The author is a game developer, and they use terminology in a way that is common and accepted within their field -- sure, it's nonstandard and "wrong" outside of the game industry...but I'd say it's a little hypocritical for software developers to complain about jargon. As a supporting example: the game Super Metroid alternates every frame between checking collisions from left-to-right or right-to-left. The direction of collision checks can make a difference for speedrunning tricks, and there's no (practical) way to control for it, so it's referred to as "RNG". From a player's perspective, the fact that it's just a frame counter rather than an LCG or something is irrelevant -- it's a luck-based factor that's outside of the player's control. And the same frame counter is used as a source of entropy elsewhere in the game, so there's an argument that it's not even wrong to call it RNG. Similarly, a Git hash is a SHA-1 of the repo contents commit message, commit date, etc., and a cryptographic hash and pseudo-random generator are very similar constructions...so calling it RNG is a little cute but not exactly inaccurate.