Michael, is this something easy to do?

If somebody does it, I'm happy to review the CL.

Though by now I have the reverse concern: All V8 developers are used to the way unittests is called. Changing it now might create confusion, right?

Are those targets usable unqualified on toplevel? If yes, wouldn't we get a name clash when making them equal? I wonder if we rather should prefix v8 targets with v8_ like we do for our fuzzer targets.

I'd suggest v8_unittests as being consistent with current naming (content_unittests, net_unittests, etc).  And yes, they are usable at top level, which is part of the current problem.  You can think you're building unit_tests, but instead be building unittests.

I didn't just send out a CL to rename it because I was worried about confusing v8 developers, so wanted to see if anyone had opinions on it.

I'll poke v8-dev.

I've only run into a couple times (In 7 years of working on Chrome), so I consider this a pretty small long-term pain, paid by all chrome developers.  The cost of the switch seems like a greater short-term pain (Though not a particularly big one), paid for just by V8 developers.  Given that, I'd advocate for the switch.

Given the impact, maybe I should send out an email to v8-dev asking about it?

Great, I'll let you send the email.

Announce: https://groups.google.com/forum/?nomobile=true#!topic/v8-dev/qBwzxLwxYWM

I started looking into changing this, and there are so many stand alone "unittest" strings that I rather doubt my ability to do so successfully.  I could rename all that aren't source_sets, but that seems likely to go badly wrong.

Giving this a try here:
https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/v8/v8/+/775955

This was a pain point for me.  I was not familiar with either.

I think it would be good to rename unittests to v8_unittests, and unit_tests to all_unittests.  This would eliminate all confusion.  To ease the transition, you could keep the old targets, and make them print something like "this target is obsolete.  Please use the all_unittests or v8_unittests targets."

unit_tests is just unit tests in the chrome/ directory, not all unit tests.  chrome_unittests would be more accurate, if we were to rename that one.