This is so extremely common that it’s funny to me you scoff at it. Under the hood these systems will convert to some numerical format to compare which version

This is so extremely common that it’s funny to me you scoff at it. Under the hood these systems will convert to some numerical format to compare which version is newer. You store it as a (proper) numerical format or you serialize it into one later, but at the end of the day it’s a number because that’s how you compare it.