I had professors do different wordings for questions throughout college, I never encountered a professor or TA that wouldn’t clarify if asked, and, generally, the amount of confusing questions evened out across all of the versions, especially over a semester. They usually aren’t doing it to trick students, they just want to make it harder for one student to look at someone else’s test.

There is a risk of it negatively impacting students, but encouraging students to ask for clarification helps a ton.

I have had too many times where I have been confused trying to figure out a giant nested loop because the writer used i/j/k or x/y/z. It’s even worse when they confused when a particular bug is because they confused what their single letter variables were and used j somewhere instead of i and no one caught it because it is so easy to brush over. Name your stuff what it is, make your life easier, make others lives easier.