I need to rant for a moment about something I see happening repeatedly in the web development space. If you are here for professional educational c...
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This is the first I've heard of this being a problem - I personally don't think it's that deep. The term single-page application, I think, was never created in order to distinguish between website and application, rather it was a label for the technology of being able to build sites (or applications) up through JavaScript alone. While I'm not aware how long the term MPA has been around, it seems as if it's just another technical term to describe the technology behind the product - being that it does not use client side routing - and can be used both for content websites and applications.
Wikipedia is a content website and Google Sheets is a web application.
SPA was absolutely created to distinguish between an application and website. It was a direct decedent of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) which made the distinction of acting more inline with a desktop application as opposed to a website. RIA started with flash, but was quickly replaced with AJAX.
I know the history doesn't matter this much, we just need to build great software, but I do see confusion from new developers. It's unclear when they should use a SPA technology (i.e. React) as opposed to a server-rendered approach (i.e. PHP).
I'm sure with time someone will find a good way to describe these differences. That or meta-frameworks will continue to expand and blur the distinction to the point where it doesn't matter.