

Jokes aside, I would view this more as a Thomas Riker situation - Voyager was split in two in that moment. Both Kims were the same Kim before the divergence field, so both Kims have the same record before then.
In truth, probably part of Kim being stuck at one rank was probably because of a lack of transfers from Voyager, for obvious reasons - it’s practically raining promotions on the Cerritos for instance, and transfer seems relatively frequent in Lower Decks.
At least later GTK fixed the whole file picker thing, though.