I think figure 1 illustrates a common misunderstanding. People who object to little-endian are often imagining it in their heads as order (3): they imagine that the bits of each byte are ordered most-significant to least-significant (big-endian), but then for some reason the bytes are ordered the opposite, least-significant to most-significant (little-endian). That indeed would make no sense.

But because most architectures don't provide any way to address individual bits, only bytes, it's entirely up to the observer to decide in which order they want to imagine the bits. When using little-endian, you imagine that the bits are in little-endian order, to be consistent with the bytes, and then everything is nice and consistent.