Why is this "ugh"? The way I see it, we're building software for users, and we try to make it useful for them. And part of that is trying to come up with a pleasing and easy to understand design language. And another part of it is catering to different cultures and languages.

For example, afaik, the standard way Chinese dates are written is something like "2020Y02M28D" but with the Chinese characters (words) for year, month, and day, instead of Y, M D. I find this totally beautiful: it doesn't take up more space than "-" or "/" or "." as a separator, and it totally disambiguates the meaning. (Well, there is the trailing "day", so we are losing one character.). It is such a wonderful use of the fact that Chinese is using ideographic characters. Isn't it?

I enjoy creating software users find useful.

But it goes beyond "this is what they do". Users tend to do a wide range of things when entering dates and you kinda have to guess what they mean. Throw in guessing what localization should be used (it's not always clear) on top of that fuzzy system and it can become a frustrating experience for everyone involved.