I agree. Exposing for the highlights is a bit of a vague term and I think different people mean different things when they say it. I suppose the one thing everyone agrees on is that exposing for the highlights means not clipping them, but apart from that the definition is a bit fluid. ETTR is much more specific.
BTW exposing-to-the-right is less to do with compensating for a property of the digital sensors and more to do with the properties of the light itself (shot noise). The more light you capture, the higher the signal-to-noise ratio and the more information you are capturing.