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I'm not sure what alternatives you think we should have for burying unidentified people. I could see an argument to be made about how poor people shouldn't have to be relegated to certain types of cemeteries or graves just because they can't afford "proper" ones. But generally even if you took away cost people usually choose where they want to be buried based on various factors if possible, or their families do for them if they haven't, so you need to have a system for people whose choice and affiliations are otherwise unknown. The original intent of potter's fields was for burying strangers and unknown people, and that's ideally what the practice should be more about rather than a class thing imo. And in that case, it's more of a necessary practice than anything else, and the dead deserve to be referred to with dignity. It's not like they're the ones who chose to be buried there, yet they bear the brunt of the term "pauper", giving an "uncomfortable name to an uncomfortable practice" is a nice idea and all but the only people who suffer for it are the people being buried there, not the ones doing the burying. So it just seems rather mean and unnecessary. The term isn't a commentary on the practice, it's a commentary on the people it's being practiced on, who arguably deserve to be treated better than that.

That's not really how it works in every case. Take slurs for example, the stigma is very much in the word, and referring to people by the terms they prefer to be referred by instead of a slur definitely does more than nothing. There's a reason why many groups and companies like to rebrand after a particularly devastating scandal, or why certain communities 9r ideologies use alternative terms for themselves, like fascists calling themselves identitarians, and so on. Words can have more influence on how we perceive something than you think.