I agree-- and sometimes this is used even by those of us who DO know better. The reason is that in communicating with laypersons, it's often too difficult for them to grasp surface contamination which isn't visible to the naked eye-- at leat to grasp it sufficiently well to understand how dangerous it is to someone with that kind of VERY low threshold, anyway.
Some of this is about low threshold, versus "even lower" threshold.
There was a time when even cooking pasta
contaminated with egg aerosolized enough protein to cause hives on my allergic daughter-- when she was in another room in the house.
We've definitely seen reactivity from peanut this way where it is
really difficult to imagine the route of exposure being anything but aerosol, but the
form/circumstances also make aerosol exposure pretty low. (Hives UNDER clothing, wheezing/stridor
without nasopharyngeal contact symptoms-- resolution upon leaving a space which is contaminated, even without 'washing' hands or skin.)
So yeah, shorthand is often a useful way for people without much experience to 'get' it well enough for safety. We do tell people "aerosol" sensitivity and have occasionaly indicated that this does in fact mean that just "eating it around her" is dangerous. Because it seems to be. The mechanistic reasons are not really essential to safety there, for the most part.
This goes a long way to explaining, however, why it is that there are some risks that NOBODY but experts (e.g. parents of allergic children) have any business evaluating and making decisions about re: a particular allergic child's safety. What is deemed okay for one child may be completely unsafe for another, and there are risks which WE may take on in our presence that should be way out of bounds for another caregiver. We know things that they can't, and we're alert to the real dangers that they may not understand are different from what they THINK of as the real dangers. Convoluted, I know.