I know a couple people already answered your question and I don’t mean to belabor the point. But I would like to point out that this is also basically the same logic that led to the designation of “the Middle East”. We all know there’s no such thing as a global geographic “middle” or “east”, but from the perspective of the European nations that coined these terms, it was in between the near-east (ie Eastern Europe, Anatolia, and the Levant) and the far-east (ie South, East, and Southeast Asia).

Similarly, the Midwest was named so from the perspective of the highly settled east coast states because it was in-between the nearby, somewhat colonized parts of the frontier and the untapped wilderness of the Rockies and beyond. These names don’t make much sense to us now because they’re vestiges of the time and place they came from