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Comparing to a baseline is useful because that is what our culture, technology and habits are adapted to. And the conditions that ecosystems can be based on. An increase in temperature away from that has consequences that need to be understood.

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I have nothing against the comparison, just with the choice to call the deviation from the average "anomaly".

I think in one step you should present the data, making sense of it is another step. Technically "anomaly" is just used for the distance to the average of some chosen timeframe, but in common language terms it suggests something unnatural is going on. As I said, it would be unnatural to have exactly the average temperature every year. (It may still be such an extreme difference that it is unnatural, but that is not how they use the word anomaly. It just means different from the average).