I'm surprised there isn't something pseudorandom thrown in for good measure – like a few digits of a hash of the source file.

Agree, mapping libraries make things only more complicated and harder to debug.

This started long before Oracle and the favouring of verbose, ritualistic boiler code was set back at Sun. James Gosling has been staunchly against overloading operators, properties and value types (almost out of spite from Microsoft's success with providing this in C#), the aftermath of which the language and run-time still struggle today and forever will. It's unfortunate that the original inventor, while a brilliant programmer himself, thought so little of others that such features were not to be included, because other programmers might mess up their use.

Yes, you have to use field as the backing variable name in a property. The article is pretty clear about its usage.

This is the first time they've done this in a long time fwiw. So the answer is "they usually never worry about this because it never happens".

That said, they will also throw compiler warnings in console during build if you are using an all lowercase word with some small number of characters. I don't remember the exact trigger or warning, but it says something like "such words may be reserved for future use by the compiler" to disincentivize use.

Yes, it's contextual. There is more details in this section of the article: Naming Conflicts with Existing Class Members

It's been a while, but from memory I think C# allows you to override keywords and use them as variable names when prefixed with @

The compiler knows what you're doing. A keyword like 'field's inside a function's braces just isn't valid. Putting 'field' after a type name in a variable declaration makes as much sense as 'private int class;'