That isn't over the top at all. "Don't tell anyone your name or anything about you" is good advice for online. I think extremely carefully before I do post online under my real name. I think it's crazy that people don't.

IRL interactions are strongly bounded by geography and the frailty of human memory. Online isn't. The difference is scale and persistence. Our social intuitions aren't calibrated to it. It only takes one deranged person to ruin you, and that person might be on the other side of the planet, and might not even have been born yet.