> We do rename deprecated fields and often give new fields their names. We rely on the field number to make that work.

Why share names? Wouldn't it be safer to, well, not?

The code becomes hard to read. You might need to change int health to float health. In that case “health” properly describes the idea. We’d change this to int DEPRECATED_health and float health.

Folks can argue that’s ugly but I’ve not seen one instance of someone confused.