I can vouch for your experience as mine has been the same, also on a Fairphone on which I installed /e/OS. I could have literally written the same comment myself — em-dash usage included!
it was supposed to be a temporary name, that i believe was intentionally chosen to be bad to make it easier to replace later. they were under pressure because the original name eelo had a trademark issue.
when they eventually found a new name "murena" it appears they then decided to use it as a brand for the phones that they themselves sell instead, keeping /e/OS as the name for the operating system
