I think this is actually pretty important. You're treating it as a consequence, that the villages have names, and the government just goes around finding out what they are and writing them down. But it's just as plausible that the government has ascribed names to originally-nameless villages, and the inhabitants have started going along with it because it's convenient. Sometimes governments will even invent whole villages, discovering discrete, unified settlements that the inhabitants hadn't even realised existed, and over time their bureaucratic fictions will turn out to be real. It's just the sort of thing that governments do.
I can't speak to areas outside of Lao and Thailand, but I have been a regular visitor to both countries for many years (Thailand since '93; Lao since '99.) I have never yet visited a village where I didn't get an immediate response to the question, "What's this village called?" Nor is there ever any hesitation on the part of the respondent to indicate that village names are an alien concept. Not only do residents have names for their own villages, but other locals know them by name: when passing villages I don't have time to visit, asking other Lao/Thai the name of said village always gets an immediate and consistent answer. There are also consistent linguistic patterns for naming settlements in Lao/Thai (politically they're separate languages, but are far more similar and mutually intelligible than Geordie is to Texian,) villages being Ban Such-and-Such, and towns, Muang So-and-So.
Further, in the case of Lao, I'm not even sure there were government names for many villages before this century. Outside of the larger urban centers (if you can call anywhere in Lao "urban,") there was precious little government documentation until recently. No one I know born before 1999 even has a birth date, merely a birth year, listed on their IDs. Up until recently, the Lao bureaucracy just didn't have the funds to reach very far into the hinterlands.
Now there's no doubt that government bureaucracies do indeed do a lot of arbitrary BS, but I have seen no evidence that that is the case in my neck of the Mekong watershed outside of two instances where this does occur in a limited sense:
- After the former Kuomintang army base/opium capital of the universe, Mae Salong, agreed to be integrated into Thailand, within whose borders it has always been located, the Thai authorities renamed it Santikhiri in an attempt to 'Thai-ify' it and disassociate it from its disreputable past. I haven't been there in years, but to my knowledge, the name never stuck anywhere but in government paperwork. I believe similar efforts have been made to relabel other villages with 'shady' or 'impolitic' pasts, but I'm not directly familiar with any.
- In the case of some hilltribes, who refer to their settlements by the name of its headman, the Thai (I can't speak to the situation in Lao) come in, ask the name of the village, record the current headman's name as the village's, and never update their records. The village is thus permanently (mis)labeled, though not entirely by government fiat.
On a national scale, Lao follows your example more closely than any Lao village that I know of. The French labeled their Lao possessions as "the Kingdom of the Laos (plural.)" Not only is this grammatically incorrect, there being no plural of any noun in Lao, but it is phonetically impossible in the Lao language (final 's' becoming a 't',) and nearly impossible for a native Lao speaker to pronounce. Don't even get me started on "Laotian."
Government fiat also played a role in naming Bangkok. While officially listed as "Bangkok" in all non-Thai documentation, the Thai name for the city is a godawfully long word (putting German or Welsh to shame) that is almost always shortened to Krungthep, the City of Angels. The Thai government simply adopted the name foreigners had been using for the city for their foreign interactions. Krungthep itself, though, is not an organic name, but a specifically chosen name for the capital of a new dynasty.
