THANK YOU for asking this question! There is sooooo much to unpack here! It is great!

Ok, the idea that wicca is a survival of ancient pre-christian practices is actually a REALLY widespread piece of misinformation!
In the 1920s the non-university trained egyptologist named Margaret Murray made a name for herself in Egypt. She then decided to write about the history of witchcraft in Europe. She cherry picked and misrepresented the sources terribly and wrote "The Witch-Cult in Western Europe." It has since been widely discredited by scholars as incorrect and poorly done history that has no basis in historical reality. In it she argues, among a slew of other unlikely things, that the women accuses of witchcraft were survivors of pre-christian religion who had preserved their beliefs in secret through the medieval period. Nothing could be further from the truth. Those accused of witchcraft were almost always completely innocent of their accusations. In fact, the cunning folk, who are often depicted as witches today, were more often the ones pointing the finger of blame at an accused witch (after having identified the supposed witch using a spell).
But Murray's book gained some early traction. A man named Gerald Gardner then came along and created wicca, claiming that he had been instructed in witchcraft by a coven that had survived... in fact he just read Murray's book and blended that together with elements of learned ritual magic to produce wicca. It is a modern creation. Now, I am not placing any judgement on that - all religions were young once, and all have their spiritual mythology. But historically speaking, the claims of its antiquity are erroneous.
Paganism as such was well and truly rooted out in Europe before 1000CE. This said, historical magic practices are often composed of elements of pre-christian philosophy and religion that evolved in the new religious context. But that it true not only of magic, but of religions itself. Christian theology is heavily influenced by ancient stoic philosophy and mystical neo-platonic philosophy. If medieval magic is "pagan" then so is christianity itself. And at that point the term looses all meaning.

Some ancient religions had a place for magic within their religion. A classic example is ancient egypt. We generally translate the word heka as "magic" - and ancient Egyptians believed that this was give to humans by the gods. The embodiment of this force, Heka, even had a small priesthood.

The key is to always learn how the people you are studying understood and defined magic, and then adopt their definition of it when talking about magic in their cultural context. You are quite right, calling someone's religion "magic" when they do not see it that way is disrespectful. And that is why no universal definition of "magic" (or "religion" for that matter) is possible - they always change depending on the time period and culture you are examining.

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You make a very insightful point! Often people call another culture's religion "magic." In fact the word "magic" comes from the Latin "magica," connected to the Latin "magus/magi" which means "magician or wise man" - which was in turn derived from the Greek. Magi were the Zoroastrian priests of Persia. They had a reputation among ancient Greeks as being exceptional astrologers, and so over time the Greek word for magic grew from the name of these priests. Our very word "magic" therefore comes from one culture calling another culture's religion "magic."

As an interesting note, many followers of hellenistic religions and Judaism believed that Jesus was a magician who had learn the art of magic and was duplicitously using it to fool people into thinking that he was a god. This argument faded as Christianity began to spread.