“Descriptive” names don’t create transparency, they create the illusion of transparency.
...some of the time. The rest of the time they're actually very useful. Giving up any attempt at having a descriptive name just in case you get it wrong is throwing the baby out with the bath water.
What's probably happened with a lot of poorly named projects is that when the scope changed to make the name redundant there was no attempt to change it. People get attached to their project names. It's possible that changing the name would require some effort, and maybe some cost (losing Github stars maybe?). That makes people stick with bad names. None of these things apply in a company. Just change the project name to reflect what it does now.
Here I'm with the OP. A descriptive project name is hard, and gets lost among projects of a similar nature.
Try to come up with descriptive names for projects like Git, Node.js, Docker, well, Linux. Well, BSD is formally a descriptive name, but it elucidates little.
Of course there are some examples of somehow descriptive names which seem natural because of the sweeping success of the product: Photoshop, React. But they are few and far between.
In short, project names are closer to branding than to engineering.
Inside a codebase names should be descriptive, and appropriate effort should be allocated to name key things in an elucidating manner; nothing to debate here. But it's a very different context.
While I agree the extreme is clearly bad, I would also challenge if any project ever succeeded on any virtues of it's name. Such that I would see this as a very low stakes decision.
...some of the time. The rest of the time they're actually very useful. Giving up any attempt at having a descriptive name just in case you get it wrong is throwing the baby out with the bath water.
What's probably happened with a lot of poorly named projects is that when the scope changed to make the name redundant there was no attempt to change it. People get attached to their project names. It's possible that changing the name would require some effort, and maybe some cost (losing Github stars maybe?). That makes people stick with bad names. None of these things apply in a company. Just change the project name to reflect what it does now.