I'm just sad

For clarity, it is indeed the case that it is important to be accurate, and not use a term that doesn't apply.

But also, people who wish to be bigoted (or wish to not care whether they are or not), and who also don't want to experience any negative consequences themselves, have a vested interest in applying a wide variety of tactics: trying to lower or abolish standards, attacking callouts as "impolite", trying to act as if the person calling them out is bringing politics into things but the person being bigoted is not, trying to position themselves as the "default" and equating "politics" with "non-default politics", and a hundred other things.

Sometimes these are intentional tactics, sometimes they're picked up by osmosis, and sometimes they're just the natural consequence of trying to defend and normalize one's behavior by any available means rather than reflecting on it or changing it. In general, people who are doing something wrong and don't want it to be wrong have many different tactics, and the better they are at it, the closer it can get to attacking epistemology and the connections between words and reality.

In short: it's important to be right when calling out bad behavior. It's also important to recognize the common rhetorical pattern of not refuting an accusation of bad behavior but instead attacking and impugning and narrowing the very concepts and words that allow calling out bad behavior.