No, it's even worse a misnomer when you are old enough to remember these days. They were CGI modules... running under a server. They were not "without a server". They didn't work without a server.
And in these days, we did have plenty of applications without any server. For instance, desktop applications using local in-process databases were very common, and plenty of what people nowadays do within their browser (connecting to a remote server on the other side of the world) was instead done using these local-only desktop applications. These applications are what could legitimately claim the moniker of "serverless". Not something which can only work when under the control of a server.
