You're right, it looked completely bogus to me with things seeming to do the opposite of what I configured, until I read your message! The problem with UIs is that people can't refrain from distinguishing themselves by doing something different from what seems intuitive to most, just because they can. And that results in the current web and interfaces...
Not just unpopular, it seems totally misleading and plain wrong to me.
I've also seen elsewhere something similar, like checkboxes used instead of checkmarks as output widgets on web pages; cannot recall where though.
I had something like this happen w some documentation I was working on in docbook (~13 years ago - forgive me if this isn’t 100% accurate), iirc: “[*]” meant “empty checkbox”.
I can’t remember the name for it, but there is a certain kind of switch design that’s meant to be visually ‘on’ when you’re turning something off.
The best example and how I learnt about this is the mute toggle on iPhones and the lock toggle on the old iPods.
When you turned the switch ‘on’ it turned the sound/buttons ‘off’.
The signify this special kind of ‘inverted’ switch, they put the orange colour on there. [1]
This is a rare use case but it does exist. And definitely shouldn’t be the default in the UI library
The check-box being an empty square when it's checked, and a filled square when it's unchecked is an unpopular design decision.