It might not be math-related; could be something as simple as a requests table being named to indicate that api X was used and now it uses API y and there is some reporting on that somewhere that doesn't care which API was used.

Ideally the table would have been named more generically but in an earlier stage startup there will be mistakes in naming things no matter how hard you try to avoid that.

So the only thing that actually breaks here is that a small number of engineers that care about this might misinterpret what it means unless they learn the appropriate tribal knowledge. Ideally it gets fixed but if you look at all of the things that can be improved in an early stage startup, this kind of thing is pretty minimal in importance so it becomes tech debt.