Yes I have checked “name:de”. That’s why I wrote that they “probably use name:de whenever it is available”.
My question is whether or not it is useful to have “name:de” set if the German name is rather obscure. Any application that wanted to display the map in a localized way would not only show the very common German names (like Peking, Rom etc), but also the others that are rather unkown to the users.