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They are synonymous. Throughout most of history, the word "dragon" hasn't been used to refer to a specific form of big reptile. Medieval sources aren't specific, and artwork is all over the place on what they look like: how many legs, how many wings (if any), etc. It's only through the relatively recent phenomenon of trying to classify and systematize things that people have adopted this rigid view of the word. My guess is that a big part of it is games like Dungeons & Dragons becoming more popular.

This picture illustrates the difference between the different dragon and dragon-adjacent creatures! My partner is also pretty adamant about this subject, so I've wound up developing the same pedantry.

Everyone knows that dragons don’t exist. But while this simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly unconcerned with what does exist. Indeed, the banality of existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to discuss it any further here. The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each non-existed in an entirely different way.

Stanisław Lem, The Cyberiad