What do you mean backwards-date? It's how someone would do it naturally. Like when we say one thousand, we do 1000, not 0001, most significant to least significant. I suppose we use mostly little-endian computers, so perhaps you'd expect to see it as 01.32 to correspond, but that would seem quite confusing to everyone, wouldn't it? A point-release would be 1.01.32? And the tenth point-release (god forbid) would be 01.01.32? I suppose we could put it at the end and get 01.32.1 but that then has it go up and down all over the place.
I think what they picked is quite natural: most-sig to least-sig. 23.10.1 has year.month.point-release
Ubuntu wouldn't be the first product to change their versioning system for releases. I don't think we need to get too worried about what will happen in 76 years from now.
For you can't have two versions with the same version number. That'd be more offensive than the translation.