How hard can it be to sort content stored in a relational database by a custom meta parameter and restrict the results to a certain language using a very popular content management system in 2023?

After wasting several hours trying to get my head around reference documents, 20 years of anecdotal StackExchange + WordPress.org discussion and ACF + Polylang support, and trying to debug my code, I will now either write my own SQL query or put the meta query results in a hashed object to sort it using my own PHP code.

What time is it now? 2003?