"short UUID" is an oxymoron. If it's short, then it's not universally unique.
Assuming you meant "short ID", how is that any different than the OP's suggestion of randomly choosing from a list of meaningless names?
Assuming you meant "short ID", how is that any different than the OP's suggestion of randomly choosing from a list of meaningless names?
Corollary: in a room of 23 randomly selected individuals, there's a 1/2 chance that two individuals share a birthday. 365 days in a year, but only 23 samples gets you to 1/2 chance of collision. Look up the "birthday paradox" for more info on this surprising result.
For a 50% chance of collision you need Math.pow(2,32/2) calls to your ID generating function which is 65536 calls.
And that's just a 50% chance. Even a 1% chance is too much (for which you would need much less than 65536 calls).
I doubt "IBM, Google or Microsoft" are using 32bit UUIDs.
"4 billion IDs is likely Unique within an organization"
I don't think it's unique within any organization.
a1, a2, ... aN for serves 2 cores 8GB ram
b1, b2, ... bN for serves 4 cores 8GB ram
c1, c2, ... bN for serves 4 cores 16GB ram
...