It’s confusing to me that you find this to be a edge case, so I guess you must be used to instances where name is the required field.
We have it the other way around: username is what everyone must have, and name is an optional field (we use prioritize_username_in_ux = true and full name required = false). Think twitter accounts, where everyone must have a username/handle, and can optionally have a name too. I don’t think it’s an edge case scenario that one wants to clear the name field (or other personal data).
Right now, once one has filled in a name, it’s impossible to remove it. This was a sync_sso limitation that we worked around with an extra API call to update the user, but now that doesn’t work either.
We considered it, but it induces some people to assume one’s username is also their real name: we run an international forum and it’s often not clear what’s a person’s name and what’s a username (other than their positioning on the interface).
I should mention that if memory doesn’t fail me, the exact same issue happens with removing one’s avatar through the sync_sso as I think that doesn’t work either — we work around that one by providing our own URL for a default avatar.
If there’s multiple fields that one may not be able to clear in some way, perhaps an array (or csv list) of what fields to clear/reset?