What really irritates me is when authors give their characters names that are difficult to pronounce. This can make it cumbersome even to get through a good book.
Yeah, one of my very favorite trilogies by Octavia Butler (Dawn, Imago, Adulthood Rights) is marred by the initial lead character being named Lilith. Perhaps not as bad as King Wisdom, but for an author known for her handling of feminist issues, I thought that it was a bit on the nose.
I make some names just randomly in my head, others via generator and with some I think about the meaning.
I go with cheesy. It could work in a very small subset of works, mostly those with a fairly fluid reality, but I think it's safest to avoid.
It depends on the genre and the subtlety, and, frankly, each character, name, reader and author. I tend to utilise it only in comedic writings, at least in its blatant forms. Sometimes, though, there's a background/canon reason why a character has a certain name; for example one of my characters in a "serious" work has the given name Windie because she was found by the man who would raise her in a forest on a windy autumn morning. Another character has the surname Lakeleaf because generations past his family lived by a beautiful lake with trees all around so that leaves would fall into it and so people started calling them the Lakeleaf family because people would then instantly know who they were referring to, as this was before surnames came into use. Whether or not you make names like these actually reflect their personalities or not is of course up to you as the author.
One of the most unpleasant and cantankerous people I ever knew in my life had the surname of Lovejoy. That negative twist can sometimes work, as long as it's not overdone. But like @Bjørnar Munkerud said, maybe it's best served up in a comedic piece. I seem to recall many Victorian authors doing this sort of thing.
