That isn't confusing at all, if you know how maintained stable releases work.

Happens with the Linux kernel as well.

There are a lot of large projects where X.1 is newer than Y.0. You release a new major version for breaking changes, but you backport security changes to previous major releases as well.

Just read https://semver.org/

Isn't that whole point of semantic release?

Minors and hotfixes allow you to release a new version for an older release (like if you released 3.7 but you found a bug present in 3.4, you can release 3.4.1 which would be newer than 3.7), making it possible to have multiple supported versions at the same time.

Tangibly related, did you know that odd versions of node don't get LTS, I found it odd at first

That’s probably the worst example you could have chosen.

You shouldn’t assume anything about relative date of 2.7 and 3.1.