Yeah... its fairly common parlance meaning in the US is basically as if it is just 'someone who supports policies that polls show over majority support for'... even though its actual meaning when used by academic political scientists or historians is more along the lines of what I described.

Though of course, lately, and mostly in America, now even academics are attempting to rexamine/redefine the concept to be more broad and inclusive.

Its literally stereotypical insulated elitist liberal both-sidesism that only seems possible in America.

Its almost entirely happened because a whole, whole lot of journalists just could not figure out how to summarily describe Trump seriously as a candidate in 2016.

Enough of them threw up their hands and decided, fuck it, he's a populist.

Of course, they made the mistake of thinking that readers/viewers were competent/intelligent enough to realize that this should be understood to mean: potentially dangerous demagogue with wildly inconsistent and often laughably absurd actual policy positions, such as somehow making Mexico pay for a border wall, a huge departure from previous Presidential candidates with... you know, discernable, fairly specific and detailed actual policy platforms, some kind of solid and identifiable ideology that these policies stemmed from, whose merits could be compared and contrasted with others.

Populism: historically almost always results in domestic chaos, autocracy, mismanagement corruption, across all historical examples, empirically.

Unfortunately the average American now seems to have roughly the reading comprehension level of a 5th or 6th grader, so they did what children who don't know what a word or term means when they don't feel like looking it up or researching it: just guess a reasonable meaning based on context and similarity to other words.

Many did not realize the subtext that 'populist' should be a big giant warning flag, and basically read it as 'popular'.

... And then we've had the last 8 years of stupifying insanity where most of the failing mainstream media got gutted and bought out by corporate interests and kept running with this crass, mutated use of 'populist', as it helped explain to morons that 'well you know both sides have their merits and fancy classifying words that describe them'.

Its actually Orwellian.

Words getting misunderstood and then neutered and redefined to the point of just being mostly empty signifiers, shaping the very language of political discourse toward being vague and useless.