Internet speeds being measured in bits instead of bytes is absolutely not to falsely represent Internet speeds, nor is there anything false about it to begin with. Measuring network transmission speeds in bits is an engineering custom used in telecommunications long before consumer internet existed and for good reason. A byte being 8 bits is the standard today, but in the past a computers byte could be anywhere from 1 to 48 bits depending on your hardware, therefore measuring internet speeds in bytes per second would be meaningless.
Even today where we’ve standardized 8 bits to a byte, measuring internet speeds in Bytes or Megabytes per second would actually be more misleading than the Megabits we use today, since not every bit in a packet is used for user data transfer nor is there even user data in every packet. 25 megabits per second is equal in size to 3.125 megabytes per second, but if you put 3.125 megabytes per second on the tin, people will expect for example to be able to download a file at 3.125 megabytes per second but they can’t. Assuming no bottlenecks and perfect efficiently, they’d only be able to download a file at a speed closer to 2.5Megabytes per second.