UI showing wrong name for automation—where is it coming from?

I’m having trouble understanding all the different names Home Assistant has for entities, and how to make them consistent.

I would like to be able to update the human-readable name once, and have this reflected throughout the UI. (What often happens is that I change a name in one place, but for some reason the dead name keeps coming back.)

So for example today I was creating an automation, and somehow ended up in a situation where one place in the UI uses “Washing Machine: Cycle Start” and another has “Washing Machine: Reset Energy Counter on Start”.

I would like to set things up so I can change a string in one place to “Washing Machine: Cycle Start”, and have this reflected everywhere in the UI.

I have no idea where the dead name coming from. It did enter that initially, but I can’t figure out how to update it, either in the UI or YAML.

The YAML for the automation is:

- id: "1745746739923"
  alias: "Washing Machine: Cycle Start"
  description: ""
  triggers:
    - trigger: state
      entity_id:
        - binary_sensor.washing_machine_status
      to: "on"
  conditions: []
  actions:
    - action: utility_meter.reset
      metadata: {}
      data: {}
      target:
        entity_id: sensor.washing_machine_energy_current_cycle
    - action: input_datetime.set_datetime
      metadata: {}
      data: {}
      target:
        entity_id: input_datetime.washing_machine_end_time_last_cycle
  mode: single

(I don’t exactly know what that “Name” field does. It seems to change some stuff. But given that it’s currently blank, fiddling with it doesn’t get me any closer to my goal of having a 1:1 mapping between entity ids and human-readable names.)

There were recent changes in showing names in more-info but I am not sure if they were released in some latest HA version. For example, these changes affected friendly names defined with customization. Suggest to check GitHub for open issues; then create a new one if needed.