I'm still not sure, to be honest. I think I might be missing something crucial. Let me see if I understand: So someone would arrive at a place and give it a name in their own language based on whatever, let's go with looks for simplicity. They call the river that has a lot of curves in it, 'Sathir'. The whole word Sathir/parts of it mean 'Bend' or something? Take the name, 'Taylor' or 'Baker', I'm not entirely sure what people mean when they say it comes from being a Tailor or that that person was once a baker. Was someone literally called Tailor after their job once and it eventually got changed to Taylor?
Yes that's exactly it. The village could be called, ''where the river bends'' if it's an important feature. Take the city of Quebec, in Algonquin (native language) it means ''where the river gets narrow''. Of course, since we don't speak the language, the name doesn't sounds silly.

Or take the city of Oxford, it's simply a contraction of : oxen + ford.
or take some chinese cities like : Bei + jing (Northern capital) and Nan + jing (southern capital), they kept the name even if it's not the capital anymore.

Lastly, in the middle ages, only the nobility had last names, not common people. This is only true for medieval Europe. Roman had family names, Chinese too and probably other civilizations as well. Eventually, people started to have names according to where they lived or what job they had. The Taylor you mentioned is a good example of that. The family name of my mother is the name of a tree and the name of my father is the name of a place.


Edit:I just noticed the comment of Ghostman above me. It's possible that I repeated some of his points.