Shutdown is a widely used term for, well graceful shutdown, of an OS showed as such in *all* major OS. "force shutdown" would be much more confusing for people as while it implies that the shutdown is forced but
not when that's the case, so it really isn't conveying the (hard) stop semantic.
Stop is quite clear, especially in the context of PVE, where it's a sub menu besides the commonly used (graceful) shutdown button, where the latter is even the default one, which we always try for the safer and more commonly wanted one.
But I don't know why we are having this discussion, this is clear: you either use clear terms like force that are unambiguous or you use ambiguous ones and expect admins to RTFM, and such a simple concept does not need RTFM, right now it is no intuitive GUI or you risk them making mistakes by force killing a VM while they just wanted to stop the VM (which is just another words for shutdown or poweroff) because they understood their meaning of the word stop. I know now how to get around it, but this posts will be asked over and over and over and you will waste your users time by not explaining it correctly. Explaining it in the GUI that is.
I'm not sure why some admins/it workers think they have the right to just blindly work with important systems without actually reading manuals, testing the new system/software/ui that they aren't used to yet and getting some basic knowledge of that. In every other workplace/domain this would be a no-go, think of a heavy-duty machine operator just starting a new machine without any experience nor training with it, mashing buttons, destroying things and blaming the maker for a (for them) unclear button label.
Yes sure, UX can always be improved, but nobody thinks 1:1 the same, so it will never be perfectly safe for everybody, so rather one should just get some basic training, especially for standard things like working with the VM power state.
The thing to do for improving UX here is not to rename the buttons, that will just confuse some other users with perception, but rather add a respective "this will immediately hard stop the VM, danger for data loss, yadda yadda" hint to the prompt.
W.r.t. stop not stopping: this stems mostly from the Linux Kernel's uninterruptible sleep state (the "D" state) that processes may be in, e.g. if NFS connection is down and VM is waiting on IO, those processes just cannot be stopped at all while in that state, only thing is (with luck) a reboot or maybe even cutting power, so this is independent of PVE and some devs of upstream kernel are pondering better semantics, or at least reduction of cases where the "D" state can happen in the first place.
What we'd like to change in the shutdown/stop procedure though is that a later stop trumps an earlier, still running, shutdown, basically overruling it. That makes sense to have for convenience.