I appreciate that for some, there is a genuine need to maintain privacy.
For those who say that real names are of no importance, I’ll just offer one counter argument:
I help out with a project that gathers data from multiple sources. For better or worse, there are iNat users who will post their observations on iNat, as well as on other citizen science platforms. When all those data sources funnel into our project, it can result in duplicated observations. Even with real names, sorting out duplicates is a tough job (people often use slightly different lat/long on different platforms). Without real names, it’s impossible.