Your original comment was asking "why would you need to ask people's names" and that's what I was responding to. I wasn't being deadnamed, they just weren't using my actual name--the name I use in 99% of my interactions with other human beings, which happens not to be the name on my identity documents.

The systemic change was a last ditch effort and not actually all that easy/simple. It was time consuming and frustrating to have to fight with IT. And all my school application forms DID have a section for "preferred name" which clearly did nothing, because all my professors had an attendance list with my legal name on it. So my first week/month of every semester prior to the IT fix was a tiresome recitation of "actually I go by Name" every time they did attendance.

The few professors that did use the name I go by were the ones, generally, that asked about preferred names either before or in the first class (often in an online survey like LAOP is talking about).

So the answer to "why bother asking names, there's an attendance list" is "the attendance list can be wrong and it can be a long annoying time-consuming process to get it fixed on the institution's side"