But regular people are not the consumers of OpenAI's API - they consume "Chatgpt" and don't care about model nomenclature.

The primary users of any API are the designers and engineers of the applications that use it. How many laypeople know what Postgresql is? How many of the applications they use run on it?

We aren't talking about the API. We're talking about the model names. If someone fires up the OpenAI website to ask it a question, nobody knows what the names mean. That's what normal people do and are probably super confused at what is going on.