Not only is this is needless pedantry, it's also incorrect, making it a very typical HN comment.

It is not uncommon to refer to pointers as "mouse cursors" or shorten it to just "cursor". In fact, Wikipedia considers pointers to be a subset of cursors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursor_(user_interface)#Pointe...

"In computer user interfaces, a cursor is an indicator used to show the current position for user interaction on a computer monitor or other display device that will respond to input from a text input or pointing device."

Is it so needless? Perhaps I'm misremembering but the distinction was at least useful in the past as GUIs evolved out of TUIs.

If they had said pointers there would be no confusion.

Since its wrong, I'd think it's basically needless by definition.

Exactly. In css this is exactly called

cursor:pointer/crosshair