

Your looking at it from a digital era. When things were paper based, month-day-year made a bunch of sense.
Our work paper archives are stored in “year” boxes (used to be filing cabinets). Open those, and you have folders that have month-day-year on their tab label. This makes it so you can quickly go through the folders sequentially quickly. If you did YYYYMMDD, you would need to ignore the first 4 numbers. DDMMYYY, the labels won’t be in numerical order.
Putting files back, you look for the correct year, but then it’s easy to drop the folder back into it’s numerical position.
In a digital structure, filing records is automated and we can use a search function, so we do store digital files as YYYYMMDD.



It likely wasn’t done on an electron microscope, or at least there is no reason to. There is no scale bar, but quick look online tells me a very fine needle is about 0.016in. 500x magnification optical lens would give you more than enough resolution for a photo like that.