"“We’re using confman for configuration management, which feeds into climan for the CLI, and then wsconn handles our WebSocket connections, permgr manages permissions, all through jqueue for our job queue”"
This is better? Is this Highlander, there can only be one of each thing? What about variations of those tools... cman2? confman? cfigmgr? Naming projects, and hence tools, is often just as much about namespacing as meaning. There _will_ be more than one of most non-trivial tools/projects, and not every configuration manager can be called "confman" (if that's even really a "good" name").
And part of it _is_ connecting utility to an "appelation": calling "your MIT-licensed file parser with 45 GitHub stars" just "parser" practically gaurantees you'll never get that 50th star, because there are already a bunch of "parser" projects and there is no reason for someone to ever find yours.
"Each one demands tribute: a few seconds of mental processing to decode the semantic cipher. Those seconds accumulate into minutes and effort, then career-spanning mountains of wasted cognitive effort."
No they don't, because you're _not_ doing that processing every time. Just like "grep" makes perfect sense _now_ because you've used it forever, once you're working on a project then something like "cobra" immediately maps to "the cli library". It might take a secon the first couple times, but humans are good at this internalizing kind of abstraction, and programmers are damn amazing at it.
The unix tools example is really terrible. "I used grep to examine the confs in etc and then cat to combine them before processing with sed and awk and tarballed the output to be curl'ed to the webdav server." Those are only intuitive because you know them already. "sed" for "stream editor"? Come on, it's not called that because it's a good name. Why not strmed, or even streameditor?. Simple, actually intuitive. It's because 'sed' was the bare minimum to be a short as possible while being unique and just memorable enough. Awk is an even better counter-example to the article's claim: it's just names, makes no sense! Has literally _nothing_ to do with what it does.
"the Golden Gate Bridge tells you it spans the Golden Gate strait."
Umm, no it doesn't tell you that. Does the Brooklyn Bridge span the Brooklyn strait? George Washinton Bridge? Bridges are not exclusively named by that which they span, and software is not exclusively named after exactly what it does.