Yes, the people who call themselves leftists or communists (on lemmy for instance) often use 'liberal' to mean Classic Liberal or Neoliberal, which basically means free-market capitalist. That's the definition used in Europe. It's confusing because it is not at all what we mean in the US. Though Democratic Party politicians are definitely mostly capitalist, we use Liberal to refer to being left on social issues in particular, and sometimes also economics.

Marx and Engels are very insistent that liberalism is a tool of the bourgeois.

Although, I think more often than not defining anything short of hardcore central control to achieve some notion of socialism, probably scientific because utopian is naive and fucking libs blah blah, is just used by crypto fascists to give their violent bigoted authoritarian tendencies an aire of legitimacy. Pretty much what the Bolsheviks did to turn the initial revolution into a fascist cesspit.

The distinction is silly anyway. Classical liberals like John Stuart Mill called for communism.