WordPress custom field sorting, weird behavior: the latest post is at the end

The line:

'orderby' => ['meta_key' => 'tq_event_date']

didn’t work. So, based on my context, where all the dates start with a number, I was able to sort the items in the following way:

'orderby' => 'meta_value'

If in the future something changes, I think the best way to solve the problem is doing it in PHP:

usort($posts, function($a, $b) {
    $d1 = get_field('tq_event_date', $a);
    $d2 = get_field('tq_event_date', $b);
    return strcmp($d2, $d1);
});