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[Jorge_Stolfi]

The idea that labels represent numerical references like "figure 45" sounds possible at first, but on inspection doesn't seem to fit.

I agree.   It seems very unlikely that the author would have chosen to number all all items in the whole book sequentially.  If the labels are numbers, I expect that they would have been assigned sequentially per page, or at most per section.  Then we would have a lot more repeated, across pages or sections.