IIRC one reason was that Azure Active Directory bore little technical relation to Active Directory and it was endlessly confusing to customers. Especially as AAD evolved into an identity system and away from a directory.

Trivial example is that AAD doesnt do LDAP, unlike regular AD which was built on it. It's not surprising that some PM would keep "AD" in the name of AADto make the transition to cloud seem less scary, but after a few years its actively unhelpful as the majority of customers have made the switch to cloud based auth and identity.

That makes more sense then, yeah. I've never used AAD and I didn't realize it had little relation to OG Active Directory.

Although, that also makes me ask why they named it after Active Directory in the first place...

AAD also broke SAML compliance that was in Active Directory Federation Services.

Actually "Azure Active Directory" was confusing in the first place, since Active Directory already existed for decades, and Azure Active Directory was not-really it's cloud-equivalent

Yes, that service was called Azure Active Directory Domain Services (now Entra ID Domain Services)