When editing an Artist it gives you the option to change artist credits as well. In the section Artist Credits you can select the artist credits that you want to rename to follow a new artist name. This does not work hover for some changes like punctuation changes (that are also usually considered Auto-Edits for all users and are applied immediately).

Take for example the artist Lil’ Kim: https://musicbrainz.org/artist/bc1b5c95-e6d6-46b5-957a-5e8908b02c1e Some of the artist credits use the Lil' Kim (with the basic ASCII punctuation character ') and some others use Lil’ Kim (with the typographically-correct punctuation ’).

Now if you edit Lil’ Kim https://musicbrainz.org/artist/bc1b5c95-e6d6-46b5-957a-5e8908b02c1e/edit and select some of those artists that use the basic ASCII punctuation, the systems will preview the new artist name with the typographically-correct punctuation that should be used. However, if you now save your changes, no edit is created and no artist credit rename is done.