It's a bit of a hangover from when Epics were first enhanced in Jira. I say "enhanced" because Epics were not designed in, they changed so that a standard issue type that was flagged as Epic (in the code, not by a human) took on additional properties and functions. All issue types must have a summary.
One problem they had was that the summary could not easily be used to do what the Epic Link/Name field pair does, so they created an Epic Name field to do it.
For a long time, there wasn't a function that would have enabled summary to be used, unless you stopped people changing the Epic's summary once it had one or more stories linked, and that's not ideal. I believe that has changed, and I'm looking forward to the day where we don't need summary and epic name.
So, while we humans (probably all of us) think the summary and the name should be the same thing, we have a bit of a hangover.
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