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That's intentional, afaict. The circle in the diagram represents the stroke start point.

I noticed this too. Draw a left curly brace from the bottom up, it calls it a right curly brace, and the reverse is true as well.

It rotates the path so that the first point is to the right of center mass. See https://makezine.com/article/maker-news/gesture-recognition-...

This behavior is independent of starting point. Drawing the star counterclockwise demonstrates.

This is a family of recognizers. I used the $P or P+, which do much better for your case, I was drawing boxes

Stroke-order dependent?