> Notice how the decoded values give relative positions, each value represents the difference from the previous position, not absolute coordinates. This is crucial: instead of encoding large column numbers like 27698 in minified files, source maps only store small deltas like +7 or +15, making the encoded strings much more compact.

Wouldn't "offset" be a more apt term?

Tangentially related, but last year I've made a tool to recover original sources from web apps which expose source maps (with the sourcesContent value present), including enumerating all lazily loaded chunks:

https://github.com/zb3/getfrontend