I hate how books in a series don’t show which number of the series they are anymore.

This has long been the case. My mom was reading some book when I was a kid that she said was really hard to understand. Later on, she realized it was the third book in a trilogy. Nowhere was this even alluded to anywhere on the book itself.

I believe it’s a deliberately-deceptive practice that just continues to this day. The above incident would’ve been around 1984-1986.