Maybe I just live on the planet, but I don’t have this problem with dB and to me, it sounds like you’re the alien. Maybe you could elaborate, or give a motivating example?

I just don’t remember encountering the problem you’re describing, and it’s unfamiliar to me. There’s something about your experience that I don’t understand, but I don’t know what it is.

Moving from EE to audio to radio is enough to go through a few iterations of "people just write dB but mean completely different things". I got used to it, but that doesn't stop me from saying it's a bad idea and we should improve things for the next person.

I often see pop sci articles saying something like '400 dB would represent a sound strong enough to tear the world apart', or 'military sonar is X dB -- strong enough to liquefy your organs at Y distance'. It's rarely clear to me which of these usages of 'dB' are directly comparable. I think the dB measurement for sonar is a different scale/unit than the one for hearing damage thresholds in air, but I couldn't figure out how to convert between the two last time I spent a few minutes trying to look it up, so in my opinion it can be fairly confusing.

The explanation and motivating examples are in the article.