did I write numbers in the docs?
Yep. There is a whole table that shows the mapping of the “name” version to the integer. This note also exists, highlighted in the docs:
"Note: All the levelMin and levelMax attributes can either be the numeric representation of the severity or the fully qualified name you can see in the severity table."
we could switch the integer values to whatever we liked in all reality.
I don’t think that’s the case. The wording of the levelMin and levelMax settings are intrinsically tied to the integer values that define the log severities.
Example:
Consider DEBUG = 4 and INFO = 3. It is a given that DEBUG is “higher” than INFO. If your max level is DEBUG, you will log INFO messages as well.
However, if we redefine DEBUG = 10000 and INFO = 20000, then DEBUG will be “lower” than INFO. That now means that a max level of DEBUG will exclude INFO messages.
Furthermore, to regain your original functionality, your MAX level of DEBUG would need to be reversed to a MIN level of DEBUG since we flipped the scale end-to-end.
We could probably tell people to blindly replace “min” with “max” and vice versa (as well as replacing any integer values with the equivilant word) but it would be a mandatory compatibility fix for upgrading. That, and I’d have to think through a few more scenarios before I’d be willing to bet any money on it. 
Does that make sense?
Thanks!
~Brad