My guess? Most green things you see are a darker green. The extremely bright green (lime according to the W3C) is less useful, so they probably chose the color based on what they thought the user would expect.

Given that RGB is well-known, I suspect their assumption was wrong, but I have nothing to back that up.

The naming is supposed to make sense for humans, not machines. Technically the "greenest green" from a technical POV is #00FF00, but the humans understanding of "green" is something more like #008000.

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.

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 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.