What surprised me more is that the amount of data existing for all waypoints on the globe is quite small, if I were to implement a feature that query by their names as an identifier the first thing I'd do is to check for duplicates in the dataset. Because if there are, I need to consider that condition in every place where I'd be querying a waypoint by a potential duplicate identifier.

I had that thought immediately when looking at flight plan format, noticed the short strings referring to waypoints, way before getting to the section where they point out the name collision issue.

Maybe I'm too used to work with absurd amounts of data (at least in comparison to this dataset), it's a constant part of my job to do some cursory data analysis to understand the parameters of the data I'm working with, what values can be duplicated or malformed, etc.