I drink only cold brew normally, and I've noticed this as well. It's 50/50 whether you will get actually cold brew at any given coffee shop or just iced hot-brew coffee, which tastes different and has much less caffeine.
Cold brew needs a new name or it will likely fade away over time.
There's nothing wrong with the name cold brew. It describes the difference from "standard" coffee. It is the charlatans selling warm brew over ice that devalue it.
As someone that greatly prefers coffee brewed cold and served on ice, I hope it doesn't fade away, because without it I have a lot less reason to get coffee out as opposed to at home.
There shouldn’t be a problem with the name, but my experience tells me that people don’t comprehend it the majority of the time, and assume incorrectly that cold brewed must be served cold. This mentality is even here in this thread in a few places. It does seem like some other word than “cold” might help avoid leading people into an erroneous conclusion.
Yeah I greatly enjoy cold brew too. But it's too easy for people working these stands to just take any old coffee that's cold (or even just "not hot) and call it "cold brew." Far too often people just don't know the difference and serve plain iced coffee.
If it were called something else, maybe there wouldn't be this level of confusion, or people couldn't get away with the cheap/lazy way of just serving yesterday's leftover hot coffee as "cold brew."
Cold brew needs a new name or it will likely fade away over time.