No, I completely missed those, but I wasn’t able to follow development until recently, so I would just skim through the two big GeoNodes threads. And from the users reactions I got the impression that changes were completely out of the blue (more of a case with dashed lines).
But looking at the replies in those two threads it seems that people still wanted to use names attributes with the fields system, also @jacqueslucke summed up the problem pretty well and even suggested a solution in this post:
But the changes still went through, so communication didn’t work out in this case.