Well renaming a bean most of the time is the same as renaming the class if there was no explicit bean name set. Choosing a different name for a class happens regularly during initial code development when concepts are still settling. The side effect in this particular case was that one of our application management screens was showing a duplicate entry in a dropdown where we list all beans implementing a specific interface. Nothing terrible really. But for example imagine one would rename a class implementing <ApplicationListener>, then business logic in that handler would execute twice because of there being two such beans now, probably causing quite a bit of confusion.
Jorg