I suspect the name "goodwill" doesn't really help, either. It's just that accounting wants both sides of the ledger to balance, and this is the bucket that was chosen a long time ago to balance the difference between traditional assets and intangibles.

I will say that while I don't think goodwill is sus in and of itself, your intuition that people doing things with the goodwill value can be sus. If I buy a company with $10m in assets and $5m in goodwill, and a year later announce I'm writing down the goodwill to $1m, something is definitely up! I may have mis-managed the company into the ground. It may be that the premium I paid was based on fraudulent assessment of the intangibles (e.g. a bunch of future sales that never existed), things like that.