I just learned this and thanks I hate it.

A lot of stuff does that when we don't know the definitive beginning, though. Wouldn't it be annoying if we theorized Population I as the oldest stars, and then they discovered two more generations before it? Then we'd have, like, Population 0 and Population A-prime or some such nonsense (astrophysicists love nonsense like that). It'd be one of those things like the Three Grand Soups (which is a list of four soups), or the Five Mile River (a 24-mile long river), or the NCAA Big Ten (a group of 18 college teams), or the twenty-two wonders on the list of Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, or the country name for Tuvalu, which means "eight islands" (Tuvalu contains nine islands).

Like the Spanish Inquisition taught us, never proudly name something after a number. You'll just end up having to leave and come in again.

They were numbered in the order that they were "discovered" (or theorized, in the case of population III). Similar to how exoplanets around a particular star are designated "a", "b", "c", etc. in order of discovery, so they usually end up not in any particular order in terms of orbital radii or size. Sometimes letters end up skipped when a letter is assigned and then it's discovered to be a false positive.

So there's logic to it, just not the logic one might prefer.

This is going to cause a lot of problems in a few billion years. Either they have to introduce negative numbers or a lot of signs on the edge of star systems have to be changed…

There was an accident with a contraceptive and a time machine.

Well, if they started at the oldest and then realized there were even older stars, then we'd have a bigger problem.

Astronomy starts with the names, then works towards understanding, which makes almost all the names wrong in some way. Sometimes very wrong.

See also: OBAFGKM and stellar magnitudes

It's like how Earth-2 had the characters introduced in the '30s and '40s while Earth-1 had the retooled versions from the '50s and '60s.