Earlier quoted context omitted.
As touched on in the article, the beauty of colour names would be that they’re celebrated for the machine. #124356 might look different on one monitor or workstation compared to another. Having colour names which are calibrated for the device makes a lot of sense. Assuming those colour names are actually calibrated, which as the article also mentions, so often wasn’t the case. As an aside, this is a big problem in DT…
CSS named colors are just aliases for specific RGB values. They are not any more calibrated than using those RGB values directly.
In the case of CSS specifically, that’s right. But the practice of assigning names to colour values predate CSS by quite some time. And the reasons for doing so are what I’ve described.