Yes, to be clear, those older proposals were only related in spirit. The technique of reconstructing a name=*-like value without using name=* wasn’t part of those proposals, but it was discussed before and after them, including in the blog posts I linked.
The lingering resistance to name:*=* comes from mappers who believe their countries to be monolingual for all practical purposes. This mailing list post summarizes the sentiment well, as does a followup concession. But it comes up quite frequently. I’m totally fine with ignoring this sentiment apart from some humor at its expense. That said, we all draw the line somewhere. Not many mappers savor the thought of pairing absolutely every name=* in a region with a name:*=*, especially if they edit with a more manual editor such as JOSM. It’s also fair to ask whether some kinds of features have mostly untranslatable names, such as shops and graves.
If any data consumer is going to go through the trouble of implementing support for these relation-based tags in postprocessing, then they aren’t going to do it one way for multilingual countries and another way for monolingual countries, and a blend of both for monolingual feature types in multilingual countries. The experiment in the latter blog post went out of its way to hide the label entirely if a redundant name tag is absent, but that’s very opinionated. Consumer-facing data consumers won’t do that willingly.