I never use color names (except if I quick want to set a color in CSS for testing purposes) so I wonder who is using color names and why?
Does all this has any real world implications?
I used to use them in both X11 and CSS way back in the day. They were really common in X11, because a lot of users were on pseudocolor displays and it made sense to reuse colors as much as possible.
If you used uncommon colors in your program on - for example - a Sparcstation 20, the palette would shift every time you moved the mouse in or out of your window. It's difficult to describe to someone that's never seen it, but it's unpleasant. No one mourns the death of pseudocolor.
Pseudocolor was a different thing. The palette wasn't fixed. The adapter could display any color in a 24-bit color space, but only 256 colors at once. So if you had one program that used one palette and another program that used a different palette on the screen at the same time, whichever program wasn't active would have its colors scrambled.
On the CSS side, I sometimes use named colors as an anchor point. Like when writing a dark mode and thinking "that text might look good in yellowish" I set "amber", and the result was good enough to keep it. Other times it makes for a good challenge, limit your design options to only named colors to not get lost in the color wheel.
As a casual user and coder, I use them, because I don't know what #FF00FF or #00FFFF look like, but I do recognize magenta or cyan instantly. Though, support for hexcodes has become better in editors, so it's now a mixed experience.
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 DTP where your display should match the page. However you obviously wouldn’t use colour names in that specific industry because you’re dealing with a vastly greater range of colours and shades.
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.
Nitpick: you absolutely would use colour names in that industry - it's just that the colour names would be more along the lines of "Pantone 137C" than "Yellow".
In desktop publishing or other graphic arts where you are sending your files to pre-press for physical printing you would use CMYK or Pantone (for spot colours) + paper grade.
