Yeah it actually is fairly common to have the high word first because humans unfortunately picked the wrong endianness, and integers are written in big endian.

E.g. what value would you expect from u16x2_to_u32(0x1122, 0x3344)? If you said 0x11223344...

Still, the rant is stupid because all that needs to happen is to fix the name.

Honestly it's really surprising that the kernel doesn't already have a library of reliably but manipulation functions for common stuff like this.