This is a real distinction in hardware manufacturing. Have you ever flown overseas to sit in a conference room with a hardware manufacturer and have a conversation about quality? I have, and one of the main points of discussion was how quality during the design phase is very different from and should not be confused with quality control during the manufacturing phase. The former (what we were concerned with in the meeting) is about making sure your design does what it needs so that fulfills its role in the larger system that the manufactured product will be part of. The latter is about making sure the physical items you produce actually follow the design.

There are two types of testing that need to be done in manufacturing. Software is more or less a product which is all design and no manufacturing/fabrication. So it only needs one of the two types of testing. "Quality control" is a term that is usually used to refer to the second type, the type that software doesn't really need.

Yes, in a software-specific context, we all know what is meant, but the term kinda does technically mean something different.