Lets take the GTX460 for example. There were five different variants of that card, 768MB, three 1GB models and a 2GB each with various shader and core counts. Would it not have made more sense to name the 768MB version a GTX450ti? Yes it would have. But they didn't and here we are. AMD has done similar. RX400 & RX500 series anyone? I could go on like that. Locically you might be correct, but in practice, NVidia will do as they please with their product line-up and name their products as they please, as they always have.
Now as for the aforementioned rumor, if NVidia brings a 16GB version of the 3080 but with the slightly reduce VRAM speed, I'm totally OK with that tradeoff. And I couldn't care less if they called it a 3080SE or just a 3080. The specs are what people should care about, not the name.