Honestly i dont understand why its so hard to understand. I play in this community to 1. Play the game and 2. Have fun with friends. If you remove a fun feature then ofc the overall experience is gonna leed to being less fun.
If anything, the fact that this apparently was such a big issue is only evidence that a lot of people like to use this feature. You have clans where people pick similar style names (snf), you have tournaments where players rename with their teammates (last rainbowcup where a team renamed to the 4 ninja turtles), you have random waves of renames of multiple groups of people which just creates fun moments for the community. I and some friends renamed to dave1 to dave9 like 5 years ago. We would all join a lobby only to hear responses like "aaah watch out here come the daves", and something like that would be the talk for an entire week because its a small community.
I personally have never heard anyone complain about this in my 8 years on faf. I even had a mod at some point join some joke renames as well.
You say that we're just here to see robots fight. Well youre wrong. Im here to see robots fight WHILE having a fun time with friends. The community at this point is way more important to me than any gameplay.