That’s the key to understanding “Hinduism”, a term used by foreigners for the cultural aggregate. If you go back sufficiently in time, some 100,000 years, you may have just a handful of tribes in India and especially after the Toba eruption in 74,000 BCE which almost wiped off all life on the planet. Since then the tribes grew and spread out all across India and the diverse cultures, customs and traditions developed mostly in regional silos. Once the tribes began to transition to settlements, it obviously called for a different set of rules of behavior. Division of labour became possible, art and craft developed, and forms of worship further diversified due to being removed from the elements. All these changes over time are visible in the Veda, which itself developed over tens of thousands of years, with much of the oldest songs well over 50,000 BCE in antiquity. These different traditions or sampradaya had their own body of knowledge, the best of which were collected and compiled into the Veda we know today, in the 5th millennium BCE.

Vedic knowledge is abstract philosophy based on the experiences of numerous sages. Being abstract they require interpretation. So from the time of the compilations, new schools emerged that interpreted the Vedic philosophy in different ways. That’s about the size of it. The sects, that is! Or more modern sampradaya. And they are all usually measured by their “distance” from the Vedanta philosophy, and these include the original forms of Buddhism and Jainism, which in the Hindu view, are just different traditions, ie, interpretations of the Vedanta philosophy.

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