Nah, I don't think it's malicious.

The term has been muddled from the beginning. There wasn't a concept of "indies vs triple A" until Microsoft started offering digital-only games under servere restrictions for size and feature set. Because that made people assume that indie = small and because some design tropes became part of the common understanding of the term we ended up in a very weird middle ground.

Before that happened nobody really thought about indie vs triple A, it was mostly first party versus third party. Games were mostly gated by storage cost and performance rather than budget, so games from big studios and small studios mostly looked the same. You could definitely have used those terms in the PS1 era to compare massive stuff like Final Fantasy VII or Metal Gear to smaller shovelware, but back then that was just the difference between good games and bad games.