Anonymous handles have a different set of problems which I think is why we've landed on real names for much of social media. Personally I prefer real names in most contexts, but I get why some people don't.
It's truly amazing that the early internet was a social experaince that went though a weird product/service commercial driven phase, and now we find ourselves trying to balance both of those out.
But a heavily moderated forum is not a completely free discussion environment. And the forums full of toxic comments aren't really that free either, because a huge portion of potential participants choose not to participate because of the nasty environment.
Clearly in some (many?) contexts there's a need for anonymity, and in some cases (HN) it seems to work out ok. I'm just not sure if anonymous is the right default for a lot of social media contexts. Both Slashdot and Reddit have become unusable for me because of the signal to noise ratio is so low (reddit may have some subreddits with better behaviour, but not any of the ones I found personally interesting).
The interfaces are also designed with this in mind -- encouraging people to post personal information and to reward your 'friends' for doing so. Even using mobile devices as two factor authentication or, increasingly, even to sign up to a service is part of the game. That mobile number immediately usually gives you an substantial amount of demographic information. And in any case also allows for near 100% certainty cross-compiling information between companies who trade and sell your information among each other to generate even more extensive profiles to everybody's benefit. Well, everybody except you.