Renaming events without a dual-write window breaks year-over-year comparisons your leadership still cites. Fire old and new names together until reports cut over cleanly.
Publish a cutover date, keep a mapping table in the same repo as your tracking helpers, and verify both streams with a short acceptance checklist.
Deprecate loudly. Silence after a rename is how shadow metrics appear in someone's private spreadsheet.
Application analytics hygiene is operational work. Treat it with the same care as a database migration — because for product decisions, it is one.