I.e., it's a fake problem that only sounds plausible to outsiders - if you live in the Bay Area, then Mountain View being called Mountain View is the least of your problems in driving to Mountain View.
Jokes aside there are places in the world that name themselves much more intuitively like you described.
Beijing = northern capital
Nanjing = southern capital
Shanghai = on the sea
Hong Kong = fragrant harbor
Xi'an = western peace
Tokyo = eastern capital
Taipei = north Tai
Tainan = south Tai
Taichung = middle Tai
Taitung = east Tai
Shandong = east mountains
Shanxi = west mountains etc.
In the USA there are many places like that as well and it's more obvious, since language hasn't changed since they were named. Ironically the landscape has due to human doing in many cases. Think Thousand Oaks, Walnut Creek, Mill Valley
A sibling post makes the argument that descriptive names would eventually lose the descriptively as language changes. This is very much validated by the German names. However, that took hundreds if not over a thousand years in some cases.
The advantage of descriptive names is that the more you know, the more you can infer despite them being far removed from current language. On the other hand if there isn't a good candidate for a descriptive name, a surname-shaped nonce is better than a misnomer.
* Latin for Broken Bridge
Plenty of similar examples in the United States. West Gate, South Park, Big Ugly Creek. Sometimes it doesn't work out, like how South Charleston, West Virginia is northwest of Charleston.
Related, you can learn a lot about the history of a place by studying maps.
Hartford, New York, Throggs Neck, Kill Van Kill, Schuylkill, Gravesend, Brooklyn, The Bronx, all gain extra meaning if you know a little bit of history.
> Tainan = south Tai
> Taichung = middle Tai
> Taitung = east Tai
> Shandong = east mountains
> Shanxi = west mountains etc.
Not quite. Shandong = "east of the mountain(s)", not "the mountains in the east", and similarly for the others. Note how in Shandong, dong comes second, whereas in Beijing, the north capital, bei comes first.
Shanghai is a weird one. "On the sea" should be haishang. 上海 in another context should mean something like "get onto the sea".
The name is much older than the size.
Wait, does that mean that "shanghaiing" someone is actually a literal description rather than just a reference to a prototypical destination?
It's an English word; it's got nothing to do with Chinese.
Perhaps the biggest historical example of this is Greenland, whose name is said to have been chosen to attract more settlers to a place that is very cold in reality. (The corresponding bit that people like to tell, in which Iceland had its name sabotaged to make Greenland more attractive, is not based in reality.)