Relative means "relative to the default position", which makes perfect sense to me. Absolute means "I'm explicitly setting this position", which also makes fair

Relative means "relative to the default position", which makes perfect sense to me. Absolute means "I'm explicitly setting this position", which also makes fairly good sense. There are probably better names they could've used for "absolute", but there are also much worse ones. But the point is, these are just names. What really matters is the quality of the underlying system. You don't hear people complaining that Lisp uses made-up strings like "car" and "cdr" to refer to the start and tail of a list, or that bash uses "ls" and "cd" to list and change directories. Those are far less intuitive than "position: absolute".