Why call them White-style battleships?

Why do you object to the term pre-dreadnought and prefer White-style battleship?

Because William Henry White's Royal Sovereign design set a contemporary battleship standard, while pre-dreadnought defines those ships retrospectively by a successor their designers could not know.

The term pre-dreadnought treats every earlier battleship chiefly as a precursor to HMS Dreadnought. William Henry White's Royal Sovereign design established a widely copied and highly successful battleship form for its own era. Calling the family White-style battleships identifies the designer and benchmark that contemporaries could actually know. The alternative label is retrospective and reductionist because it measures ships against a successor that did not yet exist.