The youth get its own (local) language for several things.
In my youth and as an earwitness several years later on I hear the same simple main description for our 1/72, 1/76 soft plastic figures.
"kleine Amis"
"little American soldier"
And this description is NOT for the railway figures in 1/87.
And today ?
I ask my nephews. They saw some of my figures several years ago. If you are young and see something of interest you immediately can`t live without it. So they get some of my Revell and Airfix figures. And they are the only one who get such figures ! Non of her friends owns such figures they told me.
They called it: "Plastcfiguren (Plasticfigures) or Männicans (I don`t know how to translate that, sorry. The closest translation I know of would be something like, little man`s ).