Having several IPv4 addresses per physical interface is a bit of an extension. It is called IP aliasing in Linux and it wasn't always there.
In addition, the manpage for ip-address makes this clear:
> The address is a protocol (IP or IPv6) address attached to a network device. Each device must have at least one address to use the corresponding protocol. It is possible to have several different addresses attached to one device. These addresses are not discriminated, so that the term alias is not quite appropriate for them and we do not use it in this document.