"The Vikings" never existed as some kind of group of people.

The viking concept is largely a 19th century invention, even if the term viking is derived from the Old Norse víkingr it wasn't popularized until the early 1800s. (e.g. by Geijer's poem Vikingen).

The original Old Norse term víkingr referred to pirates, raiders but in some contexts also to traders (journeys didn't seldom involve both). People did not go on such journeys as a full-time profession though, they had farms back home. And the vast majority of Scandinavians in the Viking Age were not víkingar in any sense.

Even those who were didn't necessarily self-identity as it. Boasts about being vikings is something you see in the Icelandic stories written well after the Viking Age. Identifying people as vikings is not that commonly attested during the actual era, in runic inscriptions. There are a few thousand runestones from the era but only a half-dozen or so refer to people as vikings or having travelled 'in viking' (i vikingu). There are far more vikings in the stories written centuries later in Iceland. Stories which are embellished at the very least, when not completely fictional. Lauritz Weibull pointed out, the notorious Jomsvikings appear completely unknown in their own time and place and only appear centuries later when they're suddenly being ascribed feats that'd earlier been attributed to others.

The term víkingr as it was used in Old Norse was by no means limited to Norsemen anyway; speakers of Old Norse used it for raiders coming from the neighboring Slavic, Baltic and Finnic peoples as well. As I said in another thread there's no reason you couldn't just as well call raiders who were Finns, Karelians, Wends, Kuronians and others 'vikings' too, we know they raided in the Baltic, including the Scandinavians, and we know the Scandinavians called such raiders vikings. So an actual Scandinavian of the Viking Age, even one who was a viking himself, would probably not have a problem with an expanded definition of the term. Because viking was not his ethnicity as far as he was concerned. That was an identity created for him a millenium later.

So the Norsemen were not doing anything qualitatively different from others around the Baltic in that era, although they did venture much farther. 'Vikings' were not the people of Scandinavia. Danes were Danes; Swedes were Swedes, Norwegians were Norwegians. On the contrary the local cultures and identities were more pronounced; A Jute may be Danish but a Jute foremost. People had different dialects, different religious customs, different laws. Just in Scania alone a half-dozen different burial customs have been documented from the Viking Age.

News headlines and press releases aside, Scandinavian historians don't generally use the term 'vikings' for any and all Scandinavians of the Viking Age in. They use them for referring to raiders specifically, if at all.

As I've said before here in a similar response to a similar question, adjudicating who the 'true vikings' were would be some pointless pissing contest that's got nothing to do with actual history. I don't know how that question could even be answered. The social changes that we associate with the start of the Viking Age did not originate in any one country but were on the contrary an international phenomenon. The rise of trading towns such as Hedeby in Denmark and Birka in Sweden was directly related to trade links with (among other places) Dorestad in the Netherlands, Wolin in present day Poland and Staraya Ladoga in Russia.