> the web folks have hijacked the term "API" as a short hand for "web API".

I don't see it. API is too vague to mean one type of API, whether it's one from before the web, or a web API. As soon as there was more than one type of API, the term API became incomplete without a qualifier. Nothing was hijacked, and your sentence includes an incomplete term.

Web devs absolutely do use "API" as a synonym for "web API". I mean, the title of this very submission is "Everything I know about good API design". One could naively expect an article about API design in general, but it's only about web APIs.