I use it more as a helpful guide than as gospel. Compared to arbitrary versioning systems where you have no idea whether something will break or not, you have a

I use it more as a helpful guide than as gospel. Compared to arbitrary versioning systems where you have no idea whether something will break or not, you have a bit more insight as to the nature of the upgrade. You still need to run tests and qualify for regressions, but overall i've run into maybe 3 minor/patch regressions over hundreds of upgrades, and none of them have made it to production.