What are classes of ships and submarines and why are they pigeonholed like that, even accross different countries?
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I’ll assume you are talking about ship types and not classes. They are not pigeonholed, those terms changed a lot in meaning over history and today they kind of lost a lot of their meaning (not all).
For Submarine it’s pretty easy. You either have attack submarine or ballistic submarine. Attack Sub are smaller, cheaper and more maneuverable and will have torpedo and possibly missile as their weaponry. Ballistic Sub are bigger, more expensive and they carry nuclear weapons as a deterrent. You also have Cruise Missile Submarine, they only exist in the US, they took a bunch of Ballistic Sub and replaced their nukes with several cruise missile. Finally you have coastal submarine, those are very small and usually operated by nation will a less developed navy or countries with a large presence in an interior sea like the Baltic.
Destroyed used to Torpedo Boat Destroyer. Their role was to be highly maneuverable, small ship with smaller guns able to rapidly engage the smaller torpedo boat. Fast, highly maneuverable small ship are pretty good at escorting bigger ship and used as screen. So the destroyer evolved to become a general purpose escort ship by WW2.
In the time of Sail ships were rated based on the number of guns and gun decks. The bigger ship with 2 or 3 gun decks were Ship of the Line, while ship with 1 gun deck and between 24 and 50 (roughly) were frigates. Smaller than this would be corvette or sloop of war depending on the country. Then you had cruiser, this was more a term to describe how the ship was used than to describe the ship itself. Cruiser were used as escort and patrol and those could be as big as a two deck or smaller than a frigate.
By the time ships were made of steel instead of wood, the names change a bit of meaning. During WW2 Destroyer were fast medium escort ship while corvette were smaller, slower escort ship. Destroyer could escort a fleet for Battle and serve as scout, while Corvette were mostly used to escort convoy or coastal patrol. Frigate had kind of felt out of use by that point, but the British readopted the term to mean an anti-submarine escort ship. Frigate were smaller, had less weapons and were slower than destroyer. Later some anti-air frigate appeared, but again they remained slower and smaller than destroyer. By that point the nomenclature of frigate started to change a lot between countries. The American had the Destroyer Escort (basically a slower Destroyer), for the Royal Navy those were frigate. By that point Cruiser were simply ship bigger than Destroyer, but smaller than Battleship.
After WW2 and the start of Guided Missile Ship, the us went the other way around. Guided Missile Frigate were bigger than Destroyer, which was different than most other Navy at the time. But by the 70s the US came back to the general consensus of size. Corvette, Frigate, Destroyer, Cruiser from smaller to bigger. With Modern technology, the differences between the ships other than size kind of became irrelevant. It’s so much easier today to make a frigate as fast as a destroyer and frigate don’t need to be as specialized as they used to be. Every size of ship can be general purpose or have a specialized role depending on what the country need.
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