I think they were trying to show something meaningful with the orientation by having their "Trend Line" be the one horizontal metric. I didn't really understan

I think they were trying to show something meaningful with the orientation by having their "Trend Line" be the one horizontal metric. I didn't really understand how they came up with that as a trend line. I agree that they made an obvious decision to give design preference over legibility. My first glance at the page was "this is neat", but as I tried to wrap my brain around the data, my thoughts changed to "what an unnecessary mess".