Yeah, bricking something makes it completely unusable anymore: ie. turned into nothing more than a brick. If you can access it and restore functionality then it wasn't bricked.
would you build a house out of soft bricks? no.. they don't exist.
bricking is permanently fucking it up. as useful as a phone as a brick. aka a paper weight
The term exists, and has been used in rooting circles since at least 2012 that I know of, since that was when I rooted my first device and ran across the term.
While it certainly doesn't make much sense as a term, that's different from the term not existing.
Soft bricking always meant the os failed but you still have a bootloader. A fully bricked phone has no bootloader and is the typical definition.
This was an incredibly common issue back in the day. Some times you could even have the appearance of no bootloader but still be able to get it back to a usable state. You thanked the gods if that happened.
What the fuck are you talking about. I was playing with custom roms 12 years ago and it was definitely a term people used. If anyone is ignorant here it’s you.