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Correct. Throughout the four Gospels included in the NT, Jesus warns about hell, or so we're told. The English translations use words like hell, eternal fire, and everlasting punishment. These translations have terrified billions of people into compliance, created entire denominations built on fear of the afterlife and justified unspeakable violence in the name of saving souls from eternal torment.
But Jesus never used the word hell. The Aramaic word that appears in the earliest manuscripts is Gehenna. And Gehenna wasn't a spiritual concept at all. It was a physical location, the valley of Hinnom just outside Jerusalem. It was the city rubbish dump where fires burned continuously to consume waste. It was a place of decay, of transformation, of things being broken down and returned to their elements. When Jesus warned about Gehenna, he was using a vivid immediate metaphor that his audience would have instantly understood. He was talking about wasted lives. He was saying, “Don't throw your life away. Don't become rubbish.”. The Greek translators used Gehenna, maintaining the reference to this specific location. But by the time medieval translators got to it, disconnected from the geographic and cultural context, they transformed it into hell, a word borrowed from Norse mythology referring to hell, the realm of the dead.
The mistranslation was complete. A metaphor about wasting your life became a doctrine about eternal conscious torment. And here’s my point, no word in Aramaic corresponds to the modern Christian concept of hell. None. The language Jesus spoke didn't have a framework for eternal punishment. It had consequences. Yes, it had natural results of destructive behavior, but the idea of a loving God maintaining an eternal torture facility, that's not in the Aramaic. That came later. You could say this was accidental, but I don’t believe so. I think it was deliberate and done by some very clever people.
The Aramaic was Gehinnam for Greek geenna, and Sheol for Greek hades. You're right that neither of these words necessarily mean endless hellfire, and that Jesus didn't use those words to teach endlessness; but he did use other words to indicate endlessness, including by comparison to the endless life of the righteous. (I identified 45 such Scriptures across all related concepts.) At the same time, this concept has indeed been abused for power dynamics for many centuries.
Mark 9:47-48 quotes Is. 66 and emphasizes the unchanging nature of the worm and fire; comparison to other uses of "unquenchable" indicates a fire that does not go out. Since this is compared to entering the kingdom which refers to the next life, it is read to be more than a metaphor. Now this is the only one I'm confident of that uses geenna with a term of endlessness, but if you want to see the whole list here it is. That uses ordinary grammaticohistorical assumptions about the text, but I haven't found a way to explain away that many references as metaphorical, temporary, or otherwise deprecated.
The Catholics and some others are adopting a doctrine of hopeful universalism that intends to be consistent with the texts, and having studied it I can't gainsay it as long as nobody gets dogmatic about the distant future. But I'm just letting you know the question is much more complicated than dismissing the incorrect veneer that you rightly move past. The fact that we've combined concept in English that were separate in Aramaic and Greek doesn't mean that this misstep annuls what the originals say. Suffice that Moses teaches there is fire in sheol and this was enough to scare the covenant Jews for 1500 years before it got used to scare Gentiles.