> Surely this person is just some sort of attention seeker. Nobody is this dumb.
In some countries it does work this way.
Luckily for the kid, when you change your name in Australia you are issued an entirely new birth certificate (I know because I changed my name!) so this child won't go through life with this name on its birth certificate and then a "change of name" certificate like in some countries.
More generally though, dome countries have a list of permitted names and whatever the registrar writes down (which might not be what you asked for) is the child's name.
Most of the European countries that had such rules have relaxed or given them up, though they sometimes remain on the books to keep parents from doing this kind of thing, but they remain in some countries in other regions of the globe.
This "whatever the registrar writes down is authoritative" applied to immigrants to the US in the late 19th and early 20th century which is why there are many common names spelled differently (Schmidt, Shmitt, and so forth). Also applied to family names when they were made mandatory (Prussia in mid 19th century, Turkey in the 1920s). In this case they often simply made the decisions with no option to appeal, which you can see Jewish family names that are joke names made up and assigned by antisemitic officials. Most of those people's descendants now live in other countries where the meaning is thankfully lost.