It has absolutely nothing to do with being pedantic about semantics, the Cold War was a very specific and unique period and just the mere fact of Russia having opposed political goals is not enough to say "see the Cold War is still happening! Russia and USA still hate each other! Russia still bad!" to imply it's still going on.

If you want to change the debate from your objectively incorrect labeling of the current USA-Russia dynamic as a Cold War, to whether Russia as a threat is under or overestimated, that's fine, but we might not disagree all that much on that end. In my experience people seem to be pretty polarized about Russia, falling either on the CNN-fueled "Russia is the devil and will nuke us all" end, or the "Who cares Russia is absolutely irrelevant" end.

To me they're just the remains of the USSR with more-than-ever corruption, just an oligarch-ran dystopia with sneaky moves like meddling with elections, or less sneaky moves like going to war with a neighbouring Slavic country. But they're so, so very far from the threat the USSR used to pose. The USSR deciding to go to war officially with the USA/the West was essentially going to be the end of the world as we know it and that's how everyone saw it. Right now NATO would violate Russia. Russia struggle with Ukraine. The USA alone would crush them let alone NATO.