I definitely looked up what names people were naming their kids when choosing my kid's name. It allowed me to pick one that was not so unusual as to be seen as weird, but wasn't going to clash with everybody else out there either. It worked. He occasionally meets others with his name, but not very often. The only issue is that his name has about five different common spellings.
My name is Michael and I definitely used this data because I didn't want my kids to have very common names. As it turns out, the first person to compile this data in the US was an actuary for the Social Security Administration, also named Michael, who was trying to name his kid and wanted to know what the most common names were so that his kids wouldn't have names that were too common: https://nameberry.com/blog/most-popular-names-how-the-list-w...
