I asked @[email protected] about this as he is more familiar with the ranking algos:

Maybe not renaming active, but possibly renaming hot… but IMO they’re fine. Its just different from reddit, and more like the hackernews algorithm: join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html#hacker-news . It’s more new-focused to prevent the main problem of reddits which is rewarding first posts / comments, regardless of their quality