Bit of a nit pick but this is a pet peeve of mine.
Creating a new word for a more specific category is never Orwellian. The project in 1984 was to create a language which was less expressive. They were destroying words describing fine distinctions and replacing them with words that elided those distinctions. Creating a new word to highlight a distinction is the opposite.
There's definitely criticisms to be made of the term serverless and how it obscures the role of servers, but Orwellian is not the correct category. Maybe we could say such services run on servelets to describe how they're "lighter" in some sense but still servers.
Yea, I agree after more thought. I think the key is what you said; the term is useful for dividing within a specific domain. People outside that domain see the word and think "those guys are calling this Category-A thing "not-category-A", that makes no sense! Inside the Category A world, there is much more nuance.
I doubleplus appreciate the thought.