It isn't a misnomer at all, and comments like yours are why it is increasingly important to remind people about the linguistic foundations of these models.
For example, no matter many books you read about riding a bike, you still need to actually get on a bike and do some practice before you can ride it. The reading can certainly help, at least in theory, but, in practice, is not necessary and may even hurt (if it makes certain processes that need to be unconscious held too strongly in consciousness, due to the linguistic model presented in the book).
This is why LLMs being so strongly tied to natural language is still an important limitation (even it is clearly less limiting than most expected).
You and I can't learn to ride a bike by reading thousands of books about cycling and Newtonian physics, but a robot driven by an LLM-like process certainly can.
In practice it would make heavy use of RL, as humans do.
> no matter many books you read about riding a bike, you still need to actually get on a bike and do some practice before you can ride it
This is like saying that no matter how much you know theoretically about a foreign language you still need to train your brain to talk it. It has little to do with the reality of that language or the correctness of your model of it, but rather with the need to train realtime circuits to do some work.
Let me try some variations: "no matter how many books you read about ancient history, you need to have lived there before you can reasonably talk about it". "No matter how many books you have read about quantum mechanics, you need to be a particle..."