It does communicate something. But it's not for comparing release dates of versions.
It's for marketing.
Go to Apples website, navigate to the Mac section and then to the macOS section.
That lands you on this page: https://www.apple.com/macos/ventura/
The names are used in marketing when new versions are launched.
Read the page I linked about macOS Ventura. The way that they use the name of that version here is the way that they use the OS version names in general. For marketing, when a new version is released.
Your argument that the names are non-descriptive because they were intended to be non-descriptive doesn’t absolve the criticism that non-descriptive names are confusing to a lot of people.
When people talk about Apple TV I’m never quite certain which product they’re referring to and have to infer that from the context of their sentence.
I too find their naming conventions confusing. Apple TV is another example. It could refer to 3 different things depending on how it’s used. I have an Apple TV and an Apple TV subscription but I have no idea which is technically called what.
I also disagree with their casual use of the term “Pro” too. But at least that isn’t an Apple specific problem but rather endemic across the entire tech landscape.
The Microsoft example given by the GP isn’t great though. Microsoft are, in my personal opinion, even worse at naming things than Apple. But as someone who’s released a fair amount of open source, I do acknowledge that naming things is hard.