The refactoring tools in JetBrains products are amazing for me. Renaming a variable and having all uses within scopes renamed too is great. Renaming classes by patterns is also great. Being able to move definitions to new files and have it update all my imports etc is great.
Not sure I see any downsides to optional tools
With high-powered auto-completion and one-button refactoring, your brain stops processing the full name. No one's incentive to pause for a minute and come up with thoughtful variable names. For most developers it's too mentally tempting to just puke out some CamelCase word salad, because the IDE hides all the effort of having to read/write/remember unfortunate names.
It's great to pause and come up with meaningful names and I agree more developers should do it, but refactoring is a normal part of coding and I'd rather have an easy way of renaming things as the code evolves.
For class names it might be true that long compound names are driven by auto suggestions from the IDE. But I'm wondering if they're really as bad as their reputation. Somehow it's similar as for variables. You can still come up with more meaningful names if you want but I admit that auto suggestions do more harm there.
I’m biased, though. I HATE gigantic supposedly “self documenting” (but utterly impossible to actually say aloud) identifiers.
My ideal identifiers are 2, maybe 3, syllables, with dashes or underscores, with actual documentation of WHY anything visible beyond The scope of a single function is used.
And I'm unsure about your point about meaningful names - IDEA typically won't suggest a name when renaming an existing language artifact - type, class, object, method, function etc.
It will when extracting an expression into a variable, based on the context it was derived from, and that's actually a pretty good heuristic - e.g., if the expression being extracted is
<some_var> = dependency.get_campaign_results()
campaign_results
campaigns
results