And why exactly did that term stick in the west, only transliterated as Holodomor instead?
Because that's the name it was given by the Ukranian peoples that survived it? I'm not sure what your point is here when you agree that it's a transliteration of the name.
ngram graph
It's not exactly a disputed fact that things like the Holodomor didn't gain much traction in western literature until after the fall of the soviet union, because that's when western literature was able to access it.
Discussion of the Holodomor became possible as part of the Soviet glasnost ("openness") policy in the 1980s. In Ukraine, the first official use of the word "famine" was in a December 1987 speech by Volodymyr Shcherbytskyi
Add to it that the soviets violently suppressed reporting on it within the USSR, which you can even see reflected in that graph, explains the lack of occurrence in non-western works. That seems, you know, pretty gosh dang basic.
You're seriously arguing the pretty straightforward etymology of this word is some kind of deeply political conspiracy, to deflect from the openly manufactured nature and your weird stalinist apologist thing you've got going on where millions of "lives saved" (pop quiz: how do you measure that?) somehow outweighs millions of deaths. Maybe there is a similarity with the term "holocaust", which would seem kinda fair given the scale of the killing. But you know, there isn't. Like there provably isn't, it was a term coined from the original meaning of the word "holocaust" before "The Holocaust" even happened.
Just come on with this. They share a similar root.
Do you mean dramatized names like the Great Bengal Famine? The Bengali name is "Chiẏāttōrēr mônbôntôr (lit. 'Famine of '76')", which is pretty vague given how many famines have happened in the world. Probably it merits the fancier name because it was the first one under british rule. Or did you perhaps mean the Doji bara / Skull Famine (bengali: lit 'many skulls'), which you know, not very dramatic at all and a pretty fair example of us using the indian name.
Hi! I'm a data scientist specializing in public health data modeling and I'm sorry, that was a little mean of me to bait you like that, it's a trick question: proving lives saved is the classic example of bad statistics and proving negatives. The assumptions required to make a definite statement about lives saved in a historical event are easy to make, but are necessarily so restrictive that they render any conclusions valueless unless you have definite conditions within a narrow time scope (like in a vaccine rollout or cholera outbreak). That's why meaningless phrases like "Demographic extrapolations and comparative economics" are such an easy thing to parrot - you're just saying "and then we do statistics, QED" without having to engage with the actual difficult part (the math).
Does comparative economics correlate to deaths? Sure! It correlates to just about everything you could ever want! The most famous example is the hemline index, which has spurred over a century of debate as to the actual causal connections (and if the theory itself even has merit). But proving that causal link to lives saved? Now that's a damn tricky problem, and some really promising methodology has only recently arisen from the management of ventilator shortages during covid in the US (and it's still being developed!) I highly recommend looking into it, it's a fascinating field of research right now.
Edit: Wow, you know what, I'm gonna just point to the entire sections of the wikipedia article you got that graphic from titled "Population Decline" and "Fertility and natalist policies" to address the population decline, instead of just redundantly addressing all the... uh... rigorously cited claims you just laid out.