That's not my understanding, or wikipedia's [1] understanding, of the term. Phishing is the general category of tricking people into telling you things they shouldn't. Email phishing, voice phishing (vishing), sms phising, and so on are subcategories.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing

Etymologically "phreak" and "fishing" both have nothing to do with email, "phreak" is "phone freak" and I believe it originally described messing with the tones that controlled the telephone system...

That’s my exact point. Just because you repeatedly see it used a certain way by non-practitioners to generalize for simplified communication doesn’t mean it’s the correct usage, and leads to the exact confusion I’m attempting to clarify for you.

Phishing is by default email. It’s varying mediums are subcategories.

Bottom paragraph of first section of the very same Wikipedia article.

“Phishing techniques and vectors include email spam, vishing (voice phishing), targeted phishing (spear phishing, whaling), smishing (SMS), quishing (QR code), cross-site scripting, and MiTM 2FA attacks.”