It is common that people try to sound knowledgeable by using overly complex, verbose, or obscure language. When it's a phrase like this that requires no thought to use, it an spread very quickly.
Another one that is used (and usually badly butchered when I've seen it used in tech) is "speak to".
Don't let it bother you too much though, it's human nature.
This has been glaringly obvious even to the layperson (except those brainwashed by the red scare lies) since not long after the fall of the Soviet Union. And almost certainly it should have been obvious to analysts with access to much more data well before then.
How did so many experts" get it so wrong, so many times, for so long? The simplest explanation is that they didn't, they were just lying about it.
Completely wrong, emission intensity is what matters, particularly when developing policy that includes a manufacturing exporter like China, the idea of giving them any further advantage over cleaner more efficient economies is insanity.
It's the same as emissions per capita. That's actually worse than meaningless it's actively detrimental because rewarding that metric creates all sorts of perverse incentives around increasing population growth and restricting quality of life.
And I didn't bring up total emissions by country, I was replying to someone else who did. Apparently you weren't so concerned about it when it was wrongly claimed that China was the 2nd largest polluter.
It's still going on - a far more recent red scare that that badly fooled probably most people here and is still fresh in minds despite the awkward embarrassment to ever admit wrongdoing is the Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election conspiracy theory.
Increasing population levels in highly emitting countries whose populations have naturally leveled off or are decreasing is very bad too (not to mention all the other horrific problems with this neocolonial type of immigration).
China is by far the largest emitter, dwarfing the next country (USA). China emit about as much as all of "the west" combined and will soon overtake them because they are still increasing and are likely to continue increasing for the next several decades while most of the west, even USA, emissions have been coming down for 15-20 years or more.
What's more, it's carbon intensity of production is bad, manufacturing something in China as opposed to a cleaner and more efficient country increases emissions. So it makes zero sense to give them subsidies that relatively disadvantage cleaner countries, as part of global efforts to reduce carbon.
Another one that is used (and usually badly butchered when I've seen it used in tech) is "speak to".
Don't let it bother you too much though, it's human nature.