Tbh I don't see where this is bad (except maybe the 0 label). Why should "up" always be "better"? There are countless other examples where this is not the case. Or am I missing something here?
It measures place, rather than performance (like medals got). It's a line graph, when there's no events between the data points, so it should be a bar graph. And yeah, up is better.
A bar chart for this kind of data makes no sense to me as the bar doesn't really represent anything. A scatter plot is a good choice and adding a connection line for readability is imo not so bad. It should however be inverted going up to 1 and not down to 0.