[aleph_minus_one]

> So why is it that every 3D CAD program other than FreeCAD seems to have something that solves this problem "well enough" that most people doing simple designs (aka everything you could possibly print on a 3D printer) don't seem to bump into it?

Read the article:

> https://wiki.freecad.org/Topological_naming_problem

"This problem is not unique to FreeCAD. It is generally present in CAD software, but most other CAD software has heuristics to reduce the impact of the problem on users."

So, the problem exists in (nearly?) all CAD systems, but in the big expensive commercial CAD programs, a huge amount of manpower was invested to hide the problem better to the user ("heuristics to reduce the impact of the problem on users") so that the users will see much more rarely see such a problem, and thus often won't be aware of the existence of the topological naming problem.