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So they’re stacked, that’s it! I was so confused how all countries could be doubling their population, this is such a weird way to present the data.

That is one of the worst charts I have seen in many years. Stacking just makes no sense!

I’m glad I’m not the only one. That presentation of data is so offensive to me, it nearly threw me off from reading the article. There are a dozen ways to present that data better. The way the authors chose is so unreadable that it would even be significantly improved as a text table.

I think in the legend,

2021 should be 2027 and 2017 should be 2021.

Otherwise I doesn't make sense to me. Maybe someone wrote by accident 2017 instead of 2027 and then swapped the legend so that it fits the graph's message.

Still, wondering why 6 co-authors, one editor and several peer-reviewers didn't notice it.

Or am I getting the graph wrong?

This is Scientific Reports, a separate sub-journal from the same publishing group and not “the” Nature.