This question on MSO got a terrible edit war. The OP told a story with somebody called Nancy. For some reason, I don't know which, there was very some vital need to hide/obfuscate/censor the name or even the gender of that person.

I never saw something like that before anywhere in SE. I don't understand what the problem of using a generic person's name in the post is. And given the last comments (see the image), even one of the moderators couldn't get what was going on:

That comment from Shog about a court case was rather cryptic and intriguing to me. What is going on after all? If nobody but Jon knew if Nancy is a real name or something he made up, what is the point of asking him to change that name?

Anyway, what I see is a violation of the author's intent, which I would still expect to be a thing that SE values. So there should be a solid reason to need to override that, but I saw none.

Further, is this a precedent to avoid using name people? What rule would I be violating if I wrote the following?

Alice was my manager, but she was asking me to give her some coffee instead of giving me any real work.

Am I obligated to write the following instead?

They were my manager, but they were asking me to give them some coffee instead of giving me any real work.

And, with this type of text, context is very obscured since it is not clear that "they" is singular in that particular phrase. Most people would expect it to be plural.

If the problem was the court thing, to take an example out of SE, let's suppose that I post something about Alice on Facebook, and Alice wants to take me to court due to that. In this case, Facebook, as a company, has virtually nothing to do with that. Now, if this is prohibited in SE by some policy or something on the CoC, I would appreciate being pointed to that.

What is so bad about giving people names after all, even if fictitious?

EDIT:

Ok, a lot of things happened since I posted this. So, considering all the comments and answers so far (including a lot of content that unfortunately were deleted), here is a synthesis of the main (but not all) issues presented so far:

Should fictitious bad feminine players be recast as masculine? If yes, isn't that a form of sexism? Is it allowed to give random generic fictitious names in anecdotes or we must avoid names entirely? Should people engage into edit wars even if they are CMs, moderators or former moderators? Is it really a good idea to engage into edit wars without commenting to present your POV? This is meta, so we are discussing the precedent that this creates.

Other minor issues presented so far are:

What to do about misgendered or ungendering fictitious or anonymous people? What about taking anyone to a court due to some maybe-fictitious name? (Not that I think this is important here, but anyway). As a side-issue, was Nancy a fictitious name for Sara Chipps or not? Some people presented that as a personal attack against her, while some other people doesn't. (Not that I think that it would be any productive of matter discussing that, but anyway.) What if some person with a fictitious name can be unannonymized and resolved to an identifiable real person (generifies the case of the precedent question).

Or to summarize all those questions in a single one thing: