The shifting thing has not been standardized in a while. Stick shift, stick on steering wheel, even buttons on steering wheel in some cars. I agree with you tho.
Even within floor-mounted stick shifts there's a bunch of different layouts- reverse can be anywhere from up and left to down and right, and can have various different lockouts (push the stick down, pull up a ring...) or none. And then there are "dog-leg" shift patterns, where reverse is immediately above first (this means that the shift between second and third, which is the one most commonly needed in racing, is a simple straight movement)
The only legal standardization in the US is the PRND layout (and the direction of automatic column shifters). Before this was codified, in the 50s, some cars had PNDLR layouts which resulted in people accidentally selecting reverse while driving.
(There is also a requirement that the shift pattern of a manual car needs to be displayed somewhere visible to the driver, except if it's what is still, amusingly, called the "standard" 3-speed H pattern. The last passenger car available in the US with a 3-speed column shift was the 1979 Chevy Nova, though it hung around on trucks for another 8 or so years.)
