Interactive fiction may have been used as an explanation for muggles, like "a movie you can control", but I cannot recall seeing it as a category in any of my gaming magazines from the 1980s.

Infocom used "interactive fiction" as the marketing tag for their games. You can easily see this on their box covers. I believe they started using the label with the "grey box" packages in 1984.

I don't know how much competing IF companies, like Level 9, tried to use the term. Infocom may have treated it as a trademark; I haven't checked.

Post-golden-age, hobbyists were congregating on the rec.arts.int-fiction newsgroup starting in 1992 or 1993. The newsgroup wasn't actually started by Infocom fans -- it was more serious literary-hypertext people who tried to co-opt the term! But that didn't stick, and it was all parser/text games and Z-code software by 1994. So "IF" was solidly held by that community through the 2000s, when IFComp and the IF Archive started to clue in to Twine and the larger space of text-based games.

As for the words "interactive fiction" -- of course their literal meaning is wildly off from how the genre is understood. Genre labels are always silly when read literally. (Contemplate "science fiction" and "fantasy", which do not mean "stories about scientists" and "made-up stories".)

(I have a soft spot for the term "adventure game", which -- for a few years -- literally meant "a game like Adventure, aka Colossal Cave." But it's changed since then, and I mean since 1982.)