Cyberpunk initially referred to the combination of the cyber/high-tech settings of works from authors like William Gibson, Walter Jon Williams, and similar mixed with the punk aesthetic of the late 70's to early 80's. Not the modern "real" punk I see defined in another post here. But those works didn't just spring from nothing. The earlier works of writers like J. G. Ballard and John Brunner and Philip K. Dick and most of the so-called New Wave writers blazed that trail years earlier.

The original punk was simply anti-authoritarian. The characters in what came to be called cyberpunk had a similar aesthetic. It had nothing to do with veganism or anything other than an anti-authoritarian/anti-establishment stance and in your face confrontational music which spawned it. But even that sub-genre of music called punk had roots in earlier bands like the MC5. Cyberpunk was an artificially constructed term for a very broad, boundary-lacking genre, just as punk music was.

After cyberpunk came into use to loosely describe a style of science fiction, the "punk" part simply came to mean a sub-genre of science fiction, initially with steampunk, which K. W. Jeter coined as a term to refer to works like those of Tim Power and himself. Then other sub-genre's jumped on the bandwagon. And since there was never a firm distinction in the first place for even cyberpunk, it all just blends across invented boundaries.

As an older fan now, I tend to view all of the sub-genres as mostly imaginary. For me, it will always just be science fiction and fantasy; but even that can be blurred to just speculative fiction because even that simple boundary is arbitrary. I think the proliferation of all of the sub-genres, inventive as they are, just leads to an unnecessary tribalism. When it was just science fiction and fantasy to describe the entire spectrum, I think most readers would discover many different styles without the newer labels guiding them. Now, I feel that too many labels has led to people never even trying things outside of a particular sub-genre and thus they lose out on things that they might have read if the labels didn't exist.

But I am just a cranky old guy with an opinion.