I recently learnt about the stroke order for も myself (I didn’t actually look up all the stroke orders when I learnt kana), and I was rather surprised too. However, it’s true that (subjectively), I find it easier to create the usual shape for も you see in calligraphy by using the 草書 stroke order. There are actually even more obvious examples of the stroke order, like these:
One can clearly see the brush sweeping back up to make the last two horizontal strokes without being lifted off the page completely.
@f3lix @seanblue To be clear, all hiragana originated from 草書 (full cursive) characters, and 草書 is the kanji script that has the lowest probability of following standard stroke order because it’s all about writing faster. (To be precise, 草書 – unless it turns out Japanese calligraphers do it differently – has its own conventions and is based on 隷書 (clerical script) and a bit of 篆書 (seal script) instead of 楷書, which is what 行書 (the semi-cursive script) is based on. That’s part of why there’s sometimes a huge difference between how semi-cursive and fully cursive kanji look.) This is pretty clear from the Wikipedia section on hiragana origins. Katakana is more likely to follow standard stroke order (which you can see from how モ is written with a different order from も) because it’s quite clearly based on 楷書, which is the standard script.
Here’s a video I posted quite a while back about how hiragana evolved, so you can see how they’re written based on abbreviating 草書 even further:
(Speaking of surprising stroke orders, ヲ is another one: it’s horizontal, horizontal, curved, not フ+horizontal. That came up alongside も when I was looking up the correct stroke order.)