> Stuff like people buying and selling items using a currency for a price the individual chooses has been common to basically every human society we have written records for.

That's a market economy, which may or may not be capitalist. Markets have existed for thousands of years under various economic systems.

Agree on your other points though, 'capitalism' was coined to just describe and criticize the system they saw emerging, one of private ownership of the means of production, combined with wage workers who do not own their tools or the product of their labor, but instead sell their time.

But its hard to have discussions around because too many people conflate "market economy" == "capitalism" but you can have markets in a feudalist, socialist, communist, any other society, that doesn't inherently make them capitalist. But I still think its useful as a term, but only to specifically describe who owns the capital.