I think the point of this one is to have the poles centered in their respective halves. Southern hemisphere on the bottom with the pole in roughly the center of the bottom half, and the same with the North.

Then going for the least distortion with the land masses. This way has West Africa and East South America a little screwy but if you were to take the equator and slide it right to fix Africa, south America gets worse. So it’s a balance.

I’m not sure what the point is to giving the southern hemisphere more room though.

Edit: The longer I look at this the weirder it gets, lots of strange choices. It’s almost as bad as worse than the Mercator without it’s one redeeming quality, straight lat/long lines with right angles. It doesn’t even put China at the center and makes it disproportionately small.

So a North-South pseudocylindrical compromise (not even equal area) map, which makes longitude lines curve back and forth, where the northern hemisphere, where most of the land is, is disproportionately small. Dafuq?

Seriously. Take any of the more usual projections and split them in the Atlantic instead of the Pacific, and China ends up fairly centered.