The thought was that the higher your intelligence, the higher the chance you know what you’re seeing. So if you have a high intelligence of say 19, then you need to design the check such that it’s very likely you’ll “succeed” in recognizing it, so with a D20 that means rolling under 19 (a 90% chance). A lower intelligence would actually be a good thing in this case, someone with an intelligence of 2 only has a 5% chance of “succeeding” and rolling under a 2.

I think the fact that you don’t want to roll higher than your intelligence is a bit counter intuitive to basically every other roll you’ll ever want to make, but I think the mechanic fits the theme really well.