I agree that the wording is vague and doesn't really make sense, I'm just speaking from experience that it did work for us. Here is a screenshot of her companion pass eligible points, showing the hotel with +10,000 points. I assure you we did not earn that by spending $10k on a hotel haha.

I believe there is a thread that was on here where I found that it did indeed count towards companion pass points, which is why we decided to try it and it worked great.