I fell across this today - I actually opened a topic on Zulip about it and was pointed here.
As someone who teaches Rust I'm very supportive of resolving this as it's really confusing.
I'm a target maintainer, so to me 'target' means 'the thing identified by aarch64-apple-darwin'. I personally see the various things cargo can ask rustc to compile as being 'crates', but I'm relaxed about the word we use here as long as its not 'target'.
Maybe it should indeed just be "all-crates". With the understanding that we're talking about crates in the current package, which is pretty intuitive and easy to document. "Root crates" in the dependency graph. Though there's of course the slight issue that in the vernacular "crate" is often used when, strictly speaking, "package" is meant.
Though there's of course the slight issue that in the vernacular "crate" is often used when, strictly speaking, "package" is meant.
Anything we can do to nudge people in the right direction is a good thing here I think.