Thats a reasonable way to understand this moniker, but then we'd have to agree that Apple laptops were never "Pro". They could never compete with proper workstations in the horsepower and out of the box I/O categories. MacBook Pro was always a compact ultraportable computer with a rather decent CPU, decent but mid-range GPU, very good display and very good battery lifetime. Jack of all trades if you want. Something that you could plug in to do some reasonably serious work, but also something that you could carry around all day without too much effort. Thats was the design of the MBP even back in the day when it was called the PowerBook, and that is exactly the design of the MBP today. The core idea and the position within the market has not changed a bit.
I think that is what people needed - a jack of all trades that had enough power to deal with intensive professional work - and nobody did it better than Apple before. Yes you could get something far more powerful which may have done your decoding 15 seconds quicker but was either not mobile, didn’t have the battery’s life, didn’t have the screen quality, durability, even having a very comfortable keyboards and usable track pad should you be on the go etc. It perfectly compromised things to have a machine comfortable to use but still very powerful, powerful enough that you rarely felt bottle necked.
I go back to 2014 when I bought my rMBP 15” for development work, I was a Windows dev but even I succumbed to this machine because it simply offered more than every windows laptop overall.
Since Skylake, I think this is no longer the case - they have made compromises that weren’t required but has affected power, durability, productivity, flexibility etc one way or another for meaningless gains (imo). They lost the balance. They have regressed in even the keyboard and trackpad, ports, touch bar and that oh so genius MagSafe, at least for my use case.
I just want it to go back to being dominant in the market at the cost of being more £££ (money no object for us who use these machines for work). Right now, objectively I find Windows laptop are superior overall.
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I don't disagree with your definition, but I think the MacBook Pro can fit this definition, depending on exactly what you need to get done on the go. I think we can agree that the speed of the SSD and of the I/O are pretty much as fast as possible by today's technology.
And, as a full time graphic designer, I can say that the current CPU, GPU and RAM are sufficient for a huge portion of graphic design work. InDesign still isn't properly multi threaded anyway. GPU acceleration isn't supported in most of Adobe's CC when working in CMYK color spaces, which means the GPU doesn't matter for any work destined for print. There's a long list of things you can do on the MacBook Pro. And for the few you can't, there are usually workarounds (like using an eGPU).
I'm not saying the MacBook Pro fits all workflows. I'm just saying that it still fits a large part of the creative professional community, and if you specifically need to get 3D renderings done on the go (although I doubt the battery would last until a complex rendering would finish anyway), then you don't need a "pro" notebook, but a proper mobile workstation.
I think you are correct to say it can still fullfill many if not the majority of professionals today and I won’t dispute that - rather what has gone wrong since 2016 is that there are now very good alternatives, ones I think are leading the way at present. The current crop has also regressed in various features (keyboard/trackpad, battery capacity, ports, no mag safe, SSD soldered). Oh and that dreaded touch bar!
