Nowadays, when people hear soft white it’s the color temperature. Back in the day, soft white actually just met the finish. A soft white bulb had a soft white coating, a clear bulb had no coating, and an inside frost bulb had either a very thin soft white coating or acid etching. This was the case for years with incandescents and halogens.

Many soft white fluorescent tubes were called “warm white” rather than soft. It was warm white, cool white, daylight for most brands. But suddenly, soft white now has nothing to do with the bulbs finish. Most 2700K clear LEDs are still called soft white.

What do you think about this?

Yes, but the two meanings of "Soft White" have been present as long or nearly as long as the term itself.  For example, here is a soft white fluorescent dating back to 1946.  I believe that's around the same time as the soft white incandescent lamps were introduced, although whether the phrase was ever used prior to Q-Coat, I'm not sure.  Another ambiguous term is "Full Spectrum".  It's typically a cooler colored lamp with better color rendering than the original daylight, but there is no criteria for what spectra qualify.  One that has popped up in recent years is "Bright White", referring to lamps in the 3000K-3500K range, and is even being used by Philips now.  This is worse than some of the others given that brightness already refers to luminosity at a distance.  At least softness and even fullness don't have technical meaning the same way brightness. 

Currently, in the US, "Soft white" is the equivalent term to "Warm white" aka 2700-3000K.
With incandescent and halogen lamps, "Soft white" referred to lamps with white finish or diffused lamps.