I may have misunderstood this observation but it's just an arbitrary epoch.
I could have chosen any epoch. It's only confusing if you're trying to interpret the numbers directly,
which can only be done if you're looking at the handful of days around the epoch.
I can't see when this would ever be used in a way for confusion to become a factor.
We usually see values in the hundreds of thousands.
Does this answer the observation?

Also, we're going to have proper datetime objects anyhoo sooner or later.