Yes.

MS called all their multimedia/gaming APIs DirectSomething for a while, then decided to group it all together into DirectX. It was also a time when you had to put an X into everything because you were XTREME.

If I'm not mistaken, this would have been toward the end of the 90s. These were Xtreme times.

Super Soakers, Jolt Cola, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Sonic the Hedgehog, the FBI would come after you for reproducing copyrighted films (according to the warning at the start of the film). Definitely seems like an era in which something would be named DirectX.

I blame it on the Gen Xers

They were all hopped up on lead and sitting too close to televisions.

Their gaming project codenames were also extreme, or more like, the theme was "being racist about the Japanese". DirectX and Xbox were named Manhattan and Midway because they were going to "kill Sony" and the DirectX logo was almost the radiation symbol.

Unsurprisingly, this didn't sell many Xboxes over there.

(Being racist is a continuing tradition with Western game journalists, and caused Japanese devs to genuinely think nobody liked them and try to Westernize their games for a generation or two. The director for the new Final Fantasy actually said he doesn't like it being called a "JRPG" because they think we use it as a slur.)

That was actually the originally proposed name, yes.