I THINK what caused them an issue was naming major characters and zones after people. An NPC staying by a lake with a name only a few people recognize is not an issue, generally speaking. Very few would even notice it is gone.
Nearly every single named character and many items in game have a name for a reason. A ton of them are family, friends, WoW community members, pop culture references, etc.
Same with D3. The yellow rare mob table has a lot of community manager screen names, website folks, streamers, other community folks, etc. Items in game are sometimes named a version of the staff nicknames.