From the st80 ages, rectangle have allways been oriented.
You have an origin and a corner inst var, not 2 corners or vertices.
And you have creation messages Rectangle class>>origin:corner:
The conventions are that of latin scribes, the orientation of rectangle should be (left->right , top->down)
There is an assumption that a rectangle with negative width (right->left) or height (bottom->top) should be treated as empty.
And this was globally well maintained except a few breakages introduced in Squeak along the years (but I hope I corrected most of the slips since then).
Now Igor and Stephane had another view more geometric and un-oriented, and wanted to change conventions/handling of empty rectangles in Pharo.
I don't know how far they went, or even if it is feasible at all... IMO, it's a recipe for maximizing breakage/gain ratio.