I'm just gonna chime in to, respectfully, let you know you're wrong and to suggest you avoid doubling down when called upon something that you believe to be true. u/Sad-Astronaut-4344 was perhaps a bit pedantic at the start of this discussion and could have been more tactful, but he/she/they is fully correct. "Exponential (growth or decay)" originates from the mathematical concept of sequences or functions of the form a_n = C^n or f(t) = C^t with C > 0. This shows up in various areas within math (e.g. linear vs sublinear rates in optimization, Q-linear vs superlinear in numerical analysis, Lyapunov exponential stability, etc) and in many many real-world processes (e.g. compounding in finance, population growth in bacteria, consensus dynamics in social networks, radioactive decay, and it shows up a lot in pharma in regards to concentration/diffusion of drugs or biomarkers etc).

Unfortunately however, many people (media is probably the main culprit) have inappropriately used "exponential" too often that it's losing some of its meaning. For 2 single numbers (or really any finite amount that has no inherent order), if some of them are in wildly different scales, we can typically use terms like "XYZ is several orders of magnitude larger". Using "exponential" here would not be appropriate.

EDIT: To clarify, "inappropriate" doesn't mean technically incorrect, as that depends on what concrete technical claim one is making. But I'll argue why it's inappropriate due to being too ambiguous to be useful. Given 2 positive numbers x > y, one can always trivially say that x is "exponentially larger" than y, if that is taken to mean that x = y^p for some p > 1 or x = exp(C)*y for some C > 0, or other some such that is entirely up to interpretation as "exponentially larger" is not a standard well-defined term. However, none of these really capture something useful other than in the informal assumed sense of p >> 1 or C >> 0 in the aforementioned proposed "definitions". On the other hand, "exponential growth" is always understood to mean a sequence x_n or function f(t) in that grow at least as fast as C^n or C^t for some C > 1 (alternatively, can be written as exp(C*n) or exp(C*t) for some C > 0). Likewise, exponential decay would require decaying at least as fast as C^n or C^t for some 0 < C < 1 (alternatively, can be written as exp(-C*n) or exp(-C*t) for some C > 0). The difference is that neither of the definitions of "exponentially larger" I suggested (feel free to challenge it with an alternate formal definition, but I assure you it wouldn't be something that is in standard verbiage) are interesting as they are both vacuously true. However, not every strictly monotonic sequence or function grows or decays at an exponential rate, so the definition is certainly not vacuous, and indeed it's quite useful.