I think it's important to remember that unix-based operating systems are under your control. You can create aliases under any name you like, if you'd prefer a different name.

But it also doesn't matter. I still think of "nano" as "like pico", but I would bet at this point fewer than 10% of the people using nano today ever used pico or maybe ever heard of it. They just know the editor is named "nano" for whatever reason.

"elm" (ELectronic Mail) begat "pine" begat "pico" (PIne COmposer) begat "nano".

This isn't a problem unique to software. Half the stuff in the sciences is not named something useful and descriptive, but rather after whoever discovered it second. Naming things is hard.

"One of the miseries of life is that everybody names things a little bit wrong, and so it makes everything a little harder to understand in the world than it would be if it were named differently." --Richard Feynman