I wonder why they named it so similiarly to the normal codex model while it much worse, while cool of course.

Not sure what you mean. It IS the same model, just a smaller version of it. And gpt-5.3-codex is a smaller version of gpt-5.3 trained more on code and agentic tasks.

Their naming has been pretty consistent since gpt-5. For example, gpt-5.1-codex-max > gpt-5.1-codex > gpt-5.1-codex-mini.