There's an interesting parallel with the emacs editor. Operations we now universally call "Cut" and "Paste" are "Kill" and "Yank". The better terms won out and emacs is stuck with Ctrl-K and Ctrl-Y as not-so-intuitive mnemonics for cut and paste.
Zundo, Xcut, Copy(!) or maybe Cancel, Vpaste
Much more memorable compared to Kcut (Kut?) and Ypaste. :p
I actually don't think they won out. Mindshare maybe, but I use kill and yank on macOS all the time. In fact, since they are enabled by default, I use Emacs keybindings all the time and everywhere on my Mac. Even the password entry screen in macos has Emacs keybindings.
I always thought that Apple saw the superiority in these bindings that they have them included by default.
Kill-yank semantics give you a full kill-ring, that's what your yanking from. CUA gives you a single copy-slot.
I agree the semantics are strictly superior though.
Yeah, some DE clipboards implement kill-yank sensitive. They're great!