Yes, I think this was a really bad example, and something without humans would have been better, so for example naming of cloud server resources.
With real world names there's also the messy issue of name changes and dead-naming. If Alice changes her (his) name to Bob, but Eve keeps Alice in as Alice, you'd have mutual contacts seeing still referring to Bob as Alice.
There are also of course the privacy concerns you mentioned, despite any optionality of sharing contacts.
Here's a problem that this does potentially solve:
"Two different cloud orchestrators need to be able to create servers which may get referenced by servers they each create. Coordinating unique names would be difficult".
Although that's an odd problem, and it's already solved in a similar way by other hierarchical naming structures with authorities such as domains, which is essentially what this pattern is describing in a roundabout way.
"com" names everything under it. "example.com" names everything under that, etc. Multiple different paths can point to the same resource.
With real world names there's also the messy issue of name changes and dead-naming. If Alice changes her (his) name to Bob, but Eve keeps Alice in as Alice, you'd have mutual contacts seeing still referring to Bob as Alice.
There are also of course the privacy concerns you mentioned, despite any optionality of sharing contacts.
Here's a problem that this does potentially solve:
"Two different cloud orchestrators need to be able to create servers which may get referenced by servers they each create. Coordinating unique names would be difficult".
Although that's an odd problem, and it's already solved in a similar way by other hierarchical naming structures with authorities such as domains, which is essentially what this pattern is describing in a roundabout way.
"com" names everything under it. "example.com" names everything under that, etc. Multiple different paths can point to the same resource.