I think you'll find in practice that one of two things happens I think the existence of those practices (like Java dependency shading) proves that people are s

I think you'll find in practice that one of two things happens I think the existence of those practices (like Java dependency shading) proves that people are struggling towards this solution on their own, without support from the language or the community. With official support, if major versions work the same way for everybody, it won't need to be so janky. In practice, I predict that people would start behaving better, doing what they should have been doing (and what many have been doing) all along: avoiding unnecessary breaking changes in non-0.x libraries, choosing function signatures carefully, and growing by accretion and living with their mistakes. Right now, I think some developers see major version bumps as a convenient way to erase their mistakes, without taking into account the cost imposed on users who end up juggling dependency conflicts.