This question is very interesting to me! I'm not very ship or romance focused (when talking about what fandoms I'm in I always feel like I need to disclaim that I am an "indifferent" shipper), and the ambiguity over what people mean by "shipping" isn't something I see discussed much. It kind of ties into the fandom purity debates, with whether a ship needs to be healthy for it to be a true ship, or whether a dynamic that is interesting to explore is enough.

I do think fandom would benefit from bringing the term "darkship" back into vogue to disambiguate things a bit.