Back in the days of arcade gaming, companies had pretty serious policies about never publicizing or even mentioning the names of the engineers that worked on the games. This was primarily because the companies valued the talent and didn't want to see their key designers poached by other companies (and, by result, keep their salaries and royalties down as well). This is why people like Robinett (Atari 2600 Adventure) put the earliest easter eggs in their work.
I'm wondering if we need to go back to that system, or perhaps come to some middle ground where if developers are going to talk publicly about games, they do it under pseudonym or something.
I believe there can be a significant difference between "Jennifer Hepler, Employee, BioWare" and "Jennifer Hepler, Writer of this specific character you hate on this specific game, BioWare".
The internet allows for a fairly "shotgun" approach when it comes to abuse. But, maybe it would be beneficial to spread the abuse out instead of allowing it to focus.
Though, there is still doxxing. You can't rule out that that information is in some way discoverable regardless.
You'd be surprised how difficult information is to get when it's not explicitly presented. The belief that the "information age" is inherently informative is a false assumption. Plenty of companies have staff directories but they don't explain the roles of each individual member. Jennifer Hepler can be presented as a creative member of Bioware working on something in some capacity.
I'm wondering if we need to go back to that system, or perhaps come to some middle ground where if developers are going to talk publicly about games, they do it under pseudonym or something.