I like to think that Buster, Bullseye, and Bookworm was a ploy to make people more dependent on the version number.

I work with Debian daily and I still couldn't tell you what order those go in. but Debian 12, Debian 13, etc.. is perfectly easy to remember and search for.

Debian is trying hard to switch to numbers. It's the user base that is resisting the change.

Maybe they should stop synlinking the new versions after 14, because AFAIK, they already tried everything else.

Yeah if they just stopped using a release name that'd probably do it, although communities can be surprisingly stubborn on some things.