And why exactly did that term stick in the west, only transliterated as Holodomor instead?
Because that's the name it was given by the Ukranian peoples that survived it? I'm not sure what your point is here when you agree that it's a transliteration of the name.
ngram graph
It's not exactly a disputed fact that things like the Holodomor didn't gain much traction in western literature until after the fall of the soviet union, because that's when western literature was able to access it.
Discussion of the Holodomor became possible as part of the Soviet glasnost ("openness") policy in the 1980s. In Ukraine, the first official use of the word "famine" was in a December 1987 speech by Volodymyr Shcherbytskyi
Add to it that the soviets violently suppressed reporting on it within the USSR, which you can even see reflected in that graph, explains the lack of occurrence in non-western works. That seems, you know, pretty gosh dang basic.
You're seriously arguing the pretty straightforward etymology of this word is some kind of deeply political conspiracy, to deflect from the openly manufactured nature and your weird stalinist apologist thing you've got going on where millions of "lives saved" (pop quiz: how do you measure that?) somehow outweighs millions of deaths. Maybe there is a similarity with the term "holocaust", which would seem kinda fair given the scale of the killing. But you know, there isn't. Like there provably isn't, it was a term coined from the original meaning of the word "holocaust" before "The Holocaust" even happened.
Just come on with this. They share a similar root.