Damn, didn't know a silly question could spark such a detailed response chock full of history goodies! Thank you for that.

I'm aware of the existence of different calendars but they are too complex to me since I (and likely most other people) already have the current calendar ingrained in us.

I'd assume the reason why we've settled on the current year-naming system was due to the prevalence (?) of Christianity / Catholicism?

I see, thanks for explaining!

Does this mean that current year is technically 2023 CE and we eventually we just dropped the CE suffix?

Would that mean 5 million years ago it would be 5,000,2023 BC or is there some other format for dates that far back?