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Why should they be synonymous? The more synonymous the word pairs are, the less you need two words. The point of having an additional word is to alter the way people answer.
You make a good and interesting point, but I think it was a bit of a misstep, because like @Folamh3 says there is a typical format that everyone is used to, and so we naturally try to fit your scheme into it and end up confused, and it even feels a bit judgemental. Next time you do a survey like this maybe just explain what you are going for - instead of "I see myself as" go with something like "How do you align with these obverse emotions? It's not nearly as punchy like that but you get the idea.
Sorry if it seems judgmental. Don't take the survey if it makes you upset.
If you're genuinely interested in the way the items work, though, take a look at the image titled "Factor Analysis Results (Manual Rotation)" from a writeup of an ACX survey: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/the-big-five-is-incomplete
Let's look at the first item you mentioned, "Active, Talkative." The factor loading on Extraversion is very high at 0.86, and the cross loadings all have absolute values less than 0.15. What this means is that this item actually does an excellent job measuring what it's supposed to, in a way that doesn't pick up contamination from other personality traits. There's something to learn from this: Extraversion is a factor of personality that strongly depends not only on how much a person says, but on a person's overall energy level, while other personality traits don't.
By contrast, if you look at similar questionnaires like the TIPI, you'll see their scales have poor discriminant validity. For example, TIPI Extraversion is found to correlate > 0.3 with Openness according to Brito-Costa, S., Moisão, A., De Almeida, H., & Castro, F. V. (2015). Psychometric properties of ten item personality iventory (tipi). International Journal of Developmental and Educational Psychology, 1(2), 115-121. https://www.redalyc.org/pdf/3498/349851793011.pdf They can't measure Extraversion and Openness independently of one another.
So ultimately, I do hear you when you say, "These questions are weird, and they make me feel uncomfortable," but I am proud of the performance of the items as measured objectively. If this means that I miss out on getting some data from people who frown at the questions and say wtf, that's OK with me.
Sorry, text based conversation is not my wheelhouse. I used misstep to imply that I thought it was good but not perfect - not mistaken, but there is room for improvement. I would also be proud of the construction of this survey, I did it before I engaged the thread and I think you did a great job, but there have been people who bounced off it because they didn't understand what you were going for in that question. So I thought back to when I did it and what I was thinking, and my thinking was "these are unusual modifiers, how do they change my response from when they are by themselves", but I am hugely attracted to novelty in general. I then thought back to why I initially thought it was unusual and came to the conclusions I mentioned - it looks like it follows the typical structure but doesn't, and a tinge of judgement.
I think if the people who bounced off it understood what you were going for, they probably would have done the survey (I know the terms you used aren't exactly obverse, but it at least conveys the idea that you don't think these things are necessarily tied) and while I understand you are cool with people not doing it if it makes them uncomfortable, I figured a change to the structure of the question would be a simple way to get a few more respondents in the future that wouldn't impact the results.
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Normally when a personality questionnaire asks you to rate how accurately an adjective describes you, they either use a single adjective (neurotic) or a series of closely related adjectives (anxious, worrisome, moody). This is the first time I recall seeing a questionnaire asking me how much a group of (to my eyes) completely independent adjectives describes me.
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