Yeah, that's actually pretty common in the real world: Nile and Indus both mean river; Mississippi means big river; Rhine and Rhone both mean flow, i.e., river. The Sahara and the Arabian Deserts are both technically the Desert Desert. Alps means mountains. A lot of the names of geographic features started out as common nouns. I just figured that the people in the Stickverse don't speak English, and the software that Burlew has been using to translate their language into English doesn't recognize place-names as proper nouns, so it just translates them literally.
On topic, I only noticed that the flag of Gobbotopia in 702 has a brown star for the bugbears after I read 1038.