Ask HN: Who decided codenames were a good idea?

Forgive my possibly young take and mix between a rant and a question on this topic, but who in their right mind decided that using codenames to identify a particular software version was a good idea? For the longest time this has always completely infuriated me, at first, when I usually helped my family members with their apple devices, I had to work with "It worked with High Sierra" or "the software page says it needs Big Sur", which mean absolutely nothing to anyone not actively using these codenames.

Then I happened to become interested in software and become a SWE which forced me to again butt my head against this as the whole Linux world decided to go down this path. Every distribution, some worse than others, decided to choose completely different ways of doing things, Mint uses female names, Debian uses Toy story characters and who knows what Ubuntu is doing. Some are alphabetically ordered, some not, again creating unnecessary friction in understanding which one is older. Some that are in alphabetical order already reached V, what happens then?

You want to download Debian/Ubuntu cloud images? The web directory is indexed by the codename, same for bugs on launchpad. Are you checking a GitHub repo to build a package locally? Be prepared to know that it no longer supports Bookworm. And please, remember the codename of all the VPSs and Linux boxes you have around the house or you'll have to check every time a package doesn't work right.

This then forces me and everyone else to go the extra step of looking up which codename corresponds to which version, which is a complete waste of time. And even if you happen to know them, I would bet few people actually remember the mapping between codename and version after a few releases.

How did you come to terms with this?

TLDR: WTF?