It's marketing, so a cynic would say that's always an attempt to mislead.

There is a good reason for it though. Up to about 32nm, the value tracked pretty much with the size of the smallest elements of the chip (the length of a transistor). Beyond that, the transistor length has not shrunk.

But other things have improved, width of transistor, widths of metal wires in the chip, materials used to make the chips with. All that has allowed more transistors, lower power, higher performance. So if the end result is similar to hypothetically if you had been able to shrink the gate length, then it can make sense.

Problem is there is not just a single way to measure features on the chip, and there is not a single way to build and lay out circuits and connect them together. You have many different types of ways to measure density and speed and power consumption of a process. And nobody seems to agree on the correct metric to use, so the number is not too meaningful. But all that all still applied before too except one single aspect of the device which was gate length, so even when you had "real" 32nm vs 32nm, those competing processes were still not the same at all.