I’ve lived through about 800 full moons, and they seem to all be pretty much the same. But now, we get “super moons” and moons with names (I think this week we had a “buck moon”) and breathless news articles about how this is the biggest closest most impressive moon in the last 4 weeks.
Did the moon hire a new PR firm?
Lunar calendars originated in prehistoric times, so naming months/moons does not seem like a new innovation.
They are not all the same, either: sometimes the moon is bigger, or smaller, or librated, or up there in the middle of the day, or eclipsed.
The Old Farmer’s Almanac is partially to blame for that.
I noticed the moon was pretty bodacious last night, and thought, “I bet that one has a name”. Buck moon, huh?
New PR rep:
There are no longer any unamed moons. You have your Wolf moon in January, next you have the Snow moon, Worm moon, Pink, Flower, Strawberry, Buck, Sturgeon. Harvest moon in the fall, Blood moon.
Super moon! Let’s all stay up and watch that, it will be the biggest moon for the year, maybe ever! Looks just like a normal full moon, we should go back inside now because it is cold and the mosquitoes are eating me up.
"on a moonlit night you’ve got your dead toad frogs, you got a dead skunk in the middle, dead skunk in the middle of the road, dead skunk in the middle of the road and it’s stinkin’ to high heaven."
I was tempted to answer, Every 28 days or so…
Says who? Aren’t there any competing Farmers’ Almanacs with different, or no, names? Plus, I suspect few have ever heard those names (I’ve never seen or opened a farmer’s almanac, for example), whereas plenty of people have heard of Shawwal and Ramadan for instance.
Native Americans, mostly. We’ve already appropriated everything of actual value from them. Now all that’s left are pointless nicknames for a full moon.
Yeah, my OP was open to interpretation. 
A better phrasing would be “Why is every full moon now something special?”
The Farmer’s Almanac may be the source of the names, but it’s been around since 1818. Something changed.
I think y’all are missing the point of the OP.
I don’t remember any of these many moon names from when I was younger. The only exception was “blue moon”, which no one knew what it was, and even that would’ve been forgotten if not for the popular song
So when and why did the media start hyping the stuff?
Ooops, ninjaed by the OP. I might have gotten it in first if I hadn’t spent time linking “popular song” to the Wiki article.
I pitted this a while back.
my media feed, that’s who. Every full moon nowadays seens to get some breathless story about the biggest/reddest/smallest/bluest “cute name” full moon.
Probably more appealing than the moon’s previous PR reps
Came for Spongmonkeys. Was not disappointed.
“Supermoon” is a term for a specific phenomena:
The sequence of names of moons isn’t at all new. Though more seasonally oriented, it’s no different from having months or days of the week with names rather than numbers*. We might notice the moon names more because they’re in our vernacular so the metaphor seems “live” --“Wolf Moon” is more immediately evocative of a wolf than “Wednesday” is of Odin.
I remember these terms being used in a technical sense, but not so much as a popular culture thing. In 1979, I read one local daily and one local weekly paper, and since there weren’t 24 hour news stations, bloggers, influencers, and thousands of channels of various sorts, I’d experience any notice of something interesting or descriptive once or twice, not multiple times and with the gushiness of reporting something mildly interesting as a news phenomenon.
*In Hebrew, for example, Sunday is “Yom Rishon,” “First Day.”
In my current apartment a full moon can wash my entire bedroom in moonlight. I find it kind of neat.
Honestly, I don’t mind the moon nicknames because it’s one of the few non-negative things that seem to be in the news these days.
The answer to “Why?” is “Clicks”. The rubes eat this shit up for some reason. Every time somebody posts, or forwards, or TwitFaces about this stuff, advertising vendors make money. So now they’re heavily into inventing shit designed to be forwardable.
Why the Moon specifically? Why not? Half of politics now is soundbites designed to be forwarded for (somebody else’s) profit. If the public will take the bait, the suppliers will quickly create a LOT more of the same bait.
Another astronomical science-adjacent thing I’ve seen in the past couple years is articles about the Earth’s perihelion/aphelion. For those unfamiliar with the terms, those are the points in the Earth’s orbit that are nearest/farthest from the Sun. Nothing really special about those points, they happen once a year each. Just something more to clutter up the science section of your newsfeed with non-science.