It sure can. I’m installing most of my stuff from F-Droid nowadays and I’m sure as hell confused why would anybody call this “sideloading”.

Maybe I'm just exhausted by the many times HN has told me I'm tilting at windmills refusing to call the Llamas of the world "open source".

Well, you side-loaded F-Droid in the first place.

perhaps because that's installing from a store, not sideloading? however poor (security-wise) the offering may be, you're still using the intended install flow

in this sense i do actually agree about the misuse of 'sideloading' - the planned change would not impact just sideloading, but also 'third party' stores

If anything, the store download is the case where it’s not installing.

There’s nothing “installed” about something which can be yanked from your device or prevented from working at someone else’s whim.