So. For me, personally, I don't care about the name. I generally care that it's great tech, and it clearly has a great team behind it.
However....
If I worked at CockroachDB, and I saw the negative feedback around the name, I'd take it to heart. At the end of the day, the name is marketing for the hard work of their engineers, and marketing for the engineers that want to use this DB (remember, they need to sell it to their managers who may not be technical).
This issue can show up in unexpected ways. For example, for cloud providers like Compose (IBM company), would they be comfortable with putting "CockroachDB" on the front page? They might if it's good enough, but it's at least a consideration (i.e. another meeting, another stakeholder to convince).
Or how about an enterprise company that's going through due diligence, and when their client asks them about their tech stack do they say "CockroachDB" or do they obfuscate the name by saying "It's a high-performance distributed database". That's a crucial moment to market CockroachDB, and it could get lost. As sad as it is, saying that you're using MySQL "because Oracle" is a point of leverage for some sales people.
People complaining about the name and how they are never going to be able to use it in production because of how gross cockroaches are is definitely the most recurring point.
I think it worked well for them, since everyone remembers the name, specially with all the distributed stores coming out lately.
A lot of congrats and excitement, questions about who uses it in a production environment, very specific use-case questions, and of course the name.
Weird how predictable the response to one company/tech always is.