Curious, why isn't it numbered the other way? My programming brain is telling me that if you're reading rfc9000 you can't reference rfc9001 because it hasn't been initialized yet. :D
Yeah, I'm absolutely great at parties!
Would you? Most of the environments I'm in requires you to define the thing before you can use it, I'm not that sad about that. In fact, that seems to make a lot more sense than that you can define something after you use it, I'd expect that to lead to a compiler/interpreter error.
Remember, it's all about tokenizing. You're associating chunks of machine code to tokens that tell the machine where to go to get the actual definition, or where to plop the machine code if statically linking.
Nobody said that RFC numbering implied any sort of temporal order. You are the Linker. Be the Linker.
It works out because RFCs convey ideas, not code. The authors and editors take care to make sure the cyclical dependencies don't imply circular definitions or other incoherences.