“The solution was obviously to adjust my command names in such a way that they were still easy to type, but would never be chosen as system command names.”
Debian ships tens of thousands of commands, so any short script name in ~/bin will collide eventually. Rhodes went through the keyboard looking for a character that needs no shift key and means nothing to the shell. The comma was the only one left. Type a comma and hit tab, and you get a list of only your own tools. Thirteen years later, nobody has topped it.