I’ve also run into this, and it can drive me up the walls some times too. Where Winds Meet was another one of those examples that I heard some people call a Soulslike. It’s possible we are heading towards a branching of the genre into Soulslike and Souls-lite, much like Roguelikes did once.

To me there are two fundamental aspects of the genre - one concerning the general structure and one concerning the combat.

Structure

A true Soulslike has progression currency you can temporarily lose if you die, and can permanently lose if you fail to do something (typically recover your corpse). Combined with this, a true Soulslike has levels whose enemies are respawned and reset every time you die.

Combat

Soulslike combat is defined by stamina management, animation lock, limited healing and iframing (either though dodge rolls, parries or both). The flow of Soulslike combat is a balance between all four of these factors. They are all equally important to the feel of combat. I could also be persuaded to add a fifth element of “pattern recognition”, as the games tend to want you to solve the combat equation by memorising specific boss attack patterns to know where you can punish.

I could see a world where a game with a structure that is Soulslike but a combat that isn’t (for example, having no stamina) could be called Souls-lite.