I haven't touched the game since basically early access started since I decided to spare myself until full release, but that sounds like it's just being faithful to DnD character creation which IMO is a bit of a mess because of legacy systems that are hard to give up. I think just getting rid of ability scores entirely and using only the modifiers would be a lot clearer. Larian isn't really to blame for that if they wanted to use 5E for their game. I suppose it's possible they could be more clear about the way character generation works in 5E.