It's a modem with an RS232 serial port. It's connected to the MacBook via a USB <-> RS232 converter and is recognised as a serial port. That's how modems have worked since 1962.
RS232 can be used for many things and MacOS should not automatically assume that any RS232 device connected to it is a modem. So it shouldn't recognize the device as such.
However according to the Apple documentation I should be able to add a Modem in the network configuration and then choose the serial port it's using. Except the option to add a Modem is missing on my MacBook.
I can't find anything about this being an optional add-on package to install but it should, according to Apple's documentation, be included in Catalina and also Big Sur (I can't upgrade yet because I need to use software that isn't compatible with Big Sur). The only other thing I could think of is that Apple silently removed support for serial modems and forgot to update the documentation.