That was indeed what I did - I changed the name in the scrpt that creates and updates the services, which left me with a lot of service objects with the old name as well as the ones with the new name; I then deleted all the old ones.
However, it seems what breaks the setup somewhat is that when I create a new service group, the satelite somehow doesn’t understand what is going on (see Passive checks not updating for 2 days), and I have to delete stuff. I create a service group for each service, or as in this case I renamed a service group to follow the renaming of the service object. It seems the easy fix is to go and delete the hosts/ and services/ directories found somewhere under _api.