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It is hard to be sure what the Egyptians meant when the wrote about about sea peoples. Sometimes there is even confusion as to what our own kids might mean with their new slang. All the more difficult translating across millenia.

Maybe they were referring to the seafaring nations of the day, or maybe the connotation of the time indicated pirates.

It does seem like they mentioned multiple groups, over the course of several generations.

The Wikipedia article on the Sea Peoples lists seven Egyptian sources which refer to more than one of the nine peoples:

c. 1275 BCE: Kadesh Inscription:[16] 3 peoples named (Karkisha, Lukka, Sherden)
c. 1200 BCE: Great Karnak Inscription: 5 peoples named (Eqwesh, Lukka, Shekelesh, Sherden, Teresh)
c. 1200 BCE: Athribis Stele:[17] 4 peoples named (Eqwesh, Shekelesh, Sherden, Teresh)
c. 1150 BCE: Medinet Habu: 7 peoples named (Denyen, Peleset, Shekelesh, Sherden, Teresh, Tjekker, Weshesh)
c. 1150 BCE: Papyrus Harris I: 5 peoples named (Denyen, Peleset, Sherden, Tjekker, Weshesh)
c. 1150 BCE: Rhetorical Stela to Ramesses III, Chapel C, Deir el-Medina:[18] 2 peoples named (Peleset, Teresh)
c. 1000 BCE: Onomasticon of Amenope: 5 peoples named (Denyen, Lukka, Peleset, Sherden, Tjekker)

Other Egyptian sources refer to one of the individual groups without reference to any of the other groups.

That article posits that the origins of those groups were:

the Denyen, identified by some with the Greek Danaoi and by others with the Israelite tribe of Dan;
the Ekwesh, possibly a group of Bronze Age Greeks (Achaeans);
the Lukka, an Anatolian people of the Aegean who may have given their name to the region of Lycia and the Lycian language;
the Peleset, whose name is generally believed to refer to the Philistines;[12]
the Shekelesh, identified possibly with the Italic people called Siculi (from Sicily);
the Sherden, possibly Sardinians or people of Sardis;
the Teresh, i.e. the Tyrrhenians, possibly ancestors of the Etruscans;
the Tjeker, possibly Greek Teucrians;
the Weshesh.