Today starts astronomical winter. It's a really neat way of breaking up the year given the equinox, and something that every astronomer can agree on. So for them, it's maybe useful. Not so much if you're actually living on Earth. It provides foolish certainty for those who need it. "Look, the solstice and therefore the start of winter was is on 12/21/2022 2148 UTC." It's a precise moment for those who require it. It's silly unless you're an astronomer, and the December solstice isn't very useful at that; the March equinox is what counts. (By the way, "winter solstice" is hemispherist. It's hardly the winter solstice in the Southern hemisphere, where the Sun reaches the Tropic of Capricorn at solar noon at a specific place at 2148 UTC today.)
It was rather more useful for power-centers when the solstice could be seen as the return of a deity or vaguely predictive of winter's eventually ending. Hard to find absolutely fixed points in time and the March equinox, the instant and the location when the Sun crosses the equator as it moves from south to north, is really tricky to measure.
But most of us are more concerned with weather and climate, not where and where the Sun occurs at one of the Tropics or crosses the equator. (Heck, most people have no clue what the tropics are, or how the Sun could cross the equator.)
Meteorologists and climatologists break the seasons down into groupings of three months based on the annual temperature cycle as well as our calendar. We generally think of winter as the coldest time of the year and summer as the warmest time of the year, with spring and fall being the transition seasons, and that is what the meteorological seasons are based on. Meteorological spring in the Northern Hemisphere includes March, April, and May; meteorological summer includes June, July, and August; meteorological fall includes September, October, and November; and meteorological winter includes December, January, and February.
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/meteorological-versus-astronomical-seasons
Of course, this is just the creeping jargonization of every-day language as we find more and more ways of being utterly prescriptivist in how we control yet another aspect of human behavior.
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