sometimes it's a flippant name for quick throwaway program that then somehow becomes major infrastructure but it's too late to change it now.

That's 99% of it. Naming things suck, and as soon as you share it and people start using it you can't change the name.

I feel like around the late 2010s we started getting more "serious" names for things. I do always love the packageN scheme though. Especially when there's like no historical record or real usage of versions 1-(N-1) lol

Python is littered with numbered packages that don't have any maintained or distributed precursors anymore, but they're forever urllib3, jinja2 or httplib2.