Honestly, were I running Debian/Ubuntu I probably would have at least called it `openjdk-N` and `openjdk-N-dev`, to match the other `-dev` packages, but...yeah. In this way I think CentOS/Fedora are a little more straightforward.
I am no system admin and the -dev or -devel convention suits the Unix and C world but maybe not the JVM or .net or nodejs worlds with their own standards and package managers.
It's not about being a system administrator, it's about understanding what the things you're installing actually do. You need development packages to develop against, rather than consume, a package. I don't understand the criticism you're making here.
But as a Java developer I know and I care about the terms JRE and JDK that are used officially and on Windows and many Linux systems and MacOS. I was not aware of the Fedora package conventions.
And as I already wrote, I had most likely installed jdk-devel because, I guess, it is listed in yum and DNF-dragora. Maybe it was a bug in some Fedora related package tool. DNF-dragora had double entries for Java. Unfortunately I do not remember anymore the details.
Someone replied this to me: "This is a fairly trivial problem to work around, although maybe this should be one of those "sane default" kind of things. Set the environment variable JAVA_HOME=/etc/alternatives/jre or point it at the specific OpenJDK version you want. That's what /etc/alternatives is for."
I guess that is way I tried "alternatives --config java" at the time.
I do not contribute to the OpenJDK project or to the JVM either.
There are standard packages in the Java world: JRE (users) and JDK (java programmers).
The JDK is a standard set of tools and libraries related to using Java as program language. It is not a Linux distro or JDK distro specific set of libraries.