“Effectively branded” would be branding for the audience that are ripe for using the tool: almost everyone who watches video and has a high resolution screen.

I'm pretty confident that nagadomi intends for waifu2x to be used for anime fanart (they say as much) and for that, it is effectively branded.

Just because something wasn't directed at a general audience doesn't mean it was poorly branded.

waifu2x is optimized for anime.

Because of its anime upscaling success, it gained a lot of awareness and is now used in more non-photorealistic images in general, with a very decent popularity.

It was used that way before it was named waifu2x. It’s just NNEDI3.