Model View Controller doesn't really mean anything in 2021. It might have meant something when the term was first coined, but everyone has such different ideas on what it means it's not a useful term anymore.
Until then (and thanks to Smalltalk) it was a composite UI design pattern combining observable and mediator patterns. It was also a recursive pattern, in which the "editor" could itself be a model-view-controller.
Rails designers completely misunderstood it (or deliberately ignored it) and simply reused the terms for something that was only marginally similar, not recursive and was not inherently "active".
Other frameworks adopted Rails' terminology and now we are left with the original pattern having been completely forgotten.
