Is it really iifa tree? Or Lifa tree?

[Croyles]

I know proper nouns are supposed to be capitalized, but since the lowercase interpretation nearly matched a real English word that made sense contextually I found it easier to assume the translators had simply forgotten and put it in lowercase than to assume it was correctly written word with unconventional spelling. I freely admit it was the wrong assumption but I still contend it was a reasonable one to make.

Exactly.
Also, FF9 does not have many mistranslations or typos etc. but I played FF9 for the first time after completing FF7 again.
After seeing things like "This guy are sick" and "Beecause" I thought anything was possible.