it’s hard to judge “better” without understanding what you’re trying to do exactly, but there are other ways to get taxa based on name from the API:
- https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/taxa/autocomplete?q=agoseris%20glauca%20glauca&rank=variety
- https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/search?q=agoseris%20glauca%20glauca&sources=taxa
also, the DWCA taxon export contains names both scientific and common names, and the taxon metadata file from the AWS Open Data Set contains scientific names. (just do a search in the forum for more information.)