I was just at the book store and I noticed that the current paperback anthology of the OT novelizations has the slightly taller dimensions of the canon Disney novels rather than the traditional mass market paperback size that all the Legends material is. Maybe they did quietly recanonize them after all.
Well, to the layman, the weird thing about slapping “legends” on the covers would be that the novelizations of the very things kept within canon aren’t canon. So maybe they left the legends label off to avoid confusion.