Adding an alternate name in an obscure tag that is not surfaced on most renderers is not the same as changing the name. Nobody is changing the name. You will still see Lake Ontario on OSM for the foreseeable future. It’s okay, you can put your pitchfork down.
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Changing the US name tag is encoding “Lake of America” as the name to use if you are in the USA or speaking American English. Saying it’s obscure does not excuse this.
When the browser’s language is “en-US”, then this absolutely can affect which labels are used when localizing strings. For instance, the widely-used OSM Americana project and the upstream Diplomat MapLibre plugin for localization both localize name tags.
As a maintainer of Americana, I can confidently say it does not process official_name:en-US, or any official_name:* tags at all. They are not present in the underlying vector tiles.
Perhaps you were thinking of name:en-US? That tag is not changing, because the commonly used name in American English is not changing. Again, you will continue to see Lake Ontario on OSM, regardless of your locale settings.
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As clay mentions above, the “US name tag” has not been, and will not be, changed. What has been added is the “US official name tag”. The entire purpose of the official_name tag and it’s variants is to record names that are not used by most people despite being officially designated by a government or other authority. It is important that we have a tag specifically for this type of name so that mappers don’t replace the actual commonly used name that we record in the name tag.
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Done and done. 
OSMthechallenger located it first.
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I’d add that it’s also because it’s not the name most people in the United States would call it. Usage of the “Gulf of America” varies by region, and I expect this will too, but if name:en-us is to reflect the most commonly understood value for English speakers in the United States, it’ll remain as Lake Ontario for a long time.
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You don’t seem to understand what has been done.
name:en=Lake Ontario
official_name:en-US=Lake America
So only if you ask a browser to display official names in en-US, you will see this. Nobody does that.
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To verify this, look up the changeset that introduced official_name:en-US=Lake America and compare its timestamp to the timestamp on the OSMUS Tileservice dashboard for the OpenMapTiles tileset. It’s currently only eight hours behind, plenty new enough to contain that change. Click on the linear feature running down the centerline of the lake. Nothing in there says “Lake America”, either in English or in translation.
If someone really wants a map that says “Lake America”, they can run Planetiler with different parameters to include official_name:*=* tags. Or more simply, they can add a custom GeoJSON to the stylesheet that plasters the neologism over top of the lake. (This is how MapQuest’s Name Lake Ontario tool works.)
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Even the USGS states that BGN/GNIS are the official source for federal use and are not responsible for how private companies use or update those names in their products. In other words, GNIS is only the “official” naming for Federal Government use. Others can decide to follow it, or not. There are political and financial ramifications for Google and Apple to bow down to the U.S. Toddler-in-Chief, but none that I can think of for OSM.
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Although I don’t moderate this section of the forum, here’s a friendly reminder from last time the US government instigated a frivolous naming dispute over an international body of water:
In this case, the lake is tagged with name=Lake Ontario, official_name:en-US=Lake America. For this situation to change, the government would need to reverse its position.[1]
The guidelines on naming disputes apply to every country equally. This is far from the only naming dispute around the world. Let’s not get bogged down in American exceptionalism when we consider how the tagging guidelines should or shouldn’t change.
Or the whole Anglophone world would need to adopt this new name, which seems less likely. ↩︎
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(Status update: By my count, there have been 18 back and forth changes to the Lake Ontario relation related to this thus far, including adding/changing/removing name=*, alt_name=*, official_name=*, alt_name:ru=*, official_name:en-US=* and others, although most have been relatively swiftly reverted).
Now that it seems the discussion has settled down and consensus has indeed settled around official_name:en-US=Lake America, it seems the time is ripe to update the wiki page to reflect that. A short temporary comment was added while this discussion was ongoing:
See
https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/lake-ontario-lake-america/146975for discussion how to handle change in official naming policy by fedgov of USA. [sic]
I’ve now updated the page to replace it with a detailed, definitive (and valid English) explaination of the OSM community conventions and consensus, based on and closely following the Name section of the Gulf of Mexico page. Additionally, I’ve added a similar standard note as on the latter page directly linking the actual relation to make it easier to find (it was not referenced anywhere before), additional fields to the infobox including a link to the forum thread there (as also on the latter page), and a short section listing the countries and states/provinces it borders (as that latter page also has).
Of course, any fixes, tweaks and improvements welcome!
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Now that that’s settled, if anyone out there has too much time on their hands to fine-tune our coverage of the Great Lakes, you’re welcome to help us correct a number of major errors in boundaries along some of the other lakes. Fair warning that your preconceptions about boundaries might break a couple times in the process.
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