Everyone probably tries to sound out names just to make sure they don't end up with some unintentional meaning or connotation. There's nothing wrong with that. (My name, had I been a boy, was slated to be something that, if my last name were pronounced as it often was, sounded like a unintentional sentence. Once they realized that, they took the name out of the running by the time my brothers were born.)
But if people are actually avoiding giving their kids names they want to give them, or conforming to other social norms based on the fear that someone will pick on them if they don't, that's bullshit.
First, it's not going to work. Your kid is still going to get picked on. Second, it places too much power with the bullies, and it perpetuates a victim blaming mindset. Look at all the comments in the stories about that kid, for example. Look at how many people are blaming the parents for some speculative future bullying and how few are accurately placing the blame on the speculative future bullies or the system that perpetuates them. (Hint: It's because they are the system that perpetuates them.)
So where do you draw the line? If you let the prospect of bullying affect your decision about what to name your child, do you also let it affect its gender presentation, like people seem to think these parents should do? What about its actual sex and gender, like
what happened to this kid? Should every parenting decision be influenced by the potential for bullying? Where do you draw the line? Their clothing, their friends, their hobbies, what they eat, what subjects they are interested in in school, their tastes in books, movies, and music?
Because there's plenty of bullying surrounding all of those, and they're all intertwined with each other. And no matter how hard you try to fit in or inoculate your kids from bullying, it's going to happen, and the more afraid they are of it, and the harder they try to placate the bullies, the more the bullies will persist.
So yeah, the most effective tactic to protect your kids from the effects of bullying is to raise them to be happy and confident and to not give a shit what assholes think.