I’m really trying to understand what’s going on here in a way that makes sense, even if it’s a twisted kind of sense.

My best guess is that some of these burners have multiple rings and that by turning the knob left (Anti-clockwise), you’re going from smaller number of rings to larger number of rings - however, the rings start at their highest heat level. So looking at the bottom right dial as an example, the first “Notch” on the left is the smallest burner on the highest setting, then as you turn left more, it’ll dial down that burner until you get to the second ring on the burner - starting at full power for that second burner and continuing to lower power until you get to the 3rd ring, then it’s same again for the 4th ring.

Is that right? am I even close? I don’t understand why you’d go from smallest burner to highest burner anti-clockwise, but go from lowest burner-power to highest clockwise. That still doesn’t make sense to me.

That’s pretty much exactly how it is.

OP’s stove is GCRE3060AF, or similar. The rightmost knob is inconsistent for reasons I cannot fathom, unless there is some obscure electrical reason. It is an electric stove, and the knobs with multiple ranges do indeed control burners that have multiple potential sizes. One of them has two selectable sizes, and other has three. On these I believe the rationale is that the high setting is the closest and most easily accessible because radiant electric ranges suck [citation not needed] and since they take forever and a day to heat up most users will just leap right to the full blast output setting immediately. I have no idea why the direction on the last knob is backwards from the others, but it is.

If you’re morbidly curious, you can view the entire control panel from OP’s stove (or one similar) here.