It's incredibly useful to categorize hostnames. It won't encompass all possible information, but enough to know at a glance what you're dealing with. Hostnames end up in all sorts of places, backup files, monitoring systems etc, and being able to tell a webserver from a switch and prod from test makes life easier to everyone.
The argument that equipment change location and uses sounds to me like an environment where disposing and creating new hosts is much too hard. The lifetime of a host should be simple and well defined such that no one is tempted to make such changes without decomissioning.
The last company I worked switched to such a scheme for their servers, and it was not a good experience. The person who spearheaded it regretted the change.
The problem was that you still have to consult a key in order to decipher the hostnames, and since the names were all similar to each other, mistakes were an everyday occurrence.
Since you had to refer to documentation anyway, using more unique names would have reduced error and confusion.
Ideally, endpoint devices are enrolled and provisioned automatically. Decommissioning is a few clicks. Service hosts are deployed and destroyed via ansible or orchestration.
Backups, monitoring, logging, SIEM, etc. are integrated with the CMDB such that events and managed hosts are linked in both directions.
If anything, I’m spoiled on having automated systems making lifecycle terribly easy. I would concede that’s a blind spot in my perspective; many organizations aren’t going to be similarly equipped. If such an organization is managing more than a few dozen devices, however, they may have bigger problems than naming.
As it should be. Thus far, the people who advocate for the abolishing of host names have been the same people who lack lifecycle processes. I don't think this is a coincidence. Most people tend to solve the problems they can grasp, and it is hard to see what you lack.
The argument that equipment change location and uses sounds to me like an environment where disposing and creating new hosts is much too hard. The lifetime of a host should be simple and well defined such that no one is tempted to make such changes without decomissioning.