Not a stupid question at all. I agree with you. But that is part of the style of VLDB -- the front matter has the publication date.
In any case this is part of the 2022-2023 volume: https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/volumes/16/
(in particular https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol16/FrontMatterVol16No11.pdf -- July 2023)