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Commonwealth vocabulary versus non-Commonwealth vocabulary. Despite being commonwealth in terms of my native culture, some of it sounds like we're trying too hard to be contrarian. Take chips and fries for example. The British call potato chips "crisps" and french fries "chips" and they'll have that discussion with you all night long, but they were patented as chips and fries respectively. Or how about "mom" versus "mum"? Despite interchanging them, I prefer "mom", especially in a world where "ma" and "mama" are common, which makes "mum" just sound like you're auditioning as Wednesday Addams. If you look in historical documents from the past, it's certainly never "mum". It all doesn't bother me so much as what bothers me is when those people (you know, the ones who call it the telly instead of a TV) say other people are the derivatives or must bend to them. If I visit London, I'm ordering french fries from McDonald's, not McChips.
Absolutely nobody is checking the god damn patents for the name of either variety of chip
That said, in British English, chips and fries are different things. McDonald's don't sell chips. Those are the thick-cut ones. Fries are the skinny ones.
How did the names get mixed up then though (for them and other things I've noticed) if there was always one name for each thing already established?
Both the flat ones and the long ones have been around for over 200 years, it would honestly be weirder if regional differences in the names had never developed. After all, why would someone in York, UK and someone in Boston, USA in the 1820s know or care what the other called their fried slices of potato? "Chips" is a pretty reasonable name for both of them, so maybe the flat ones got popular in America first but the long ones got popular in Britan first, so then each had to find another name for the other sort. I'm guessing here, but I don't think it's in any way strange that it happened, however it did happen.
British English using "fries" for thinner chips (chips in the British sense) actually is because of American influence, though. In the same way that Americans call their long fried potato "French fries" because they are fried in the French way, Brits call those thinner ones "fries" because they're fried the American way. You wouldn't usually say "American fries" here because "fries" by itself alreadyy means that, but if you did people would immediately understand that you mean the thinner sort that you get at McDonald's, not the thicker sort you get at a fish & chip shop.