I think it's more to help you see the show's "present day" as near our own present day.

Station Eleven's "present" is in the 2040s and it did create some intuitive weirdness to see a 2040 civilisation that's essentially regressed, even given their pandemic. It's a little stranger again with TLOU, because there is some semblance of functional government and technological development, so if you set it mostly ten years in the future, you have to try to work out what cultural and tech development might happen in those intervening years under these exceptionally odd circumstances.

Making their present line up with our present solves that, and it's just plain neater to present the audience with a parallel 2023.