Attempting to extend the "semver skeptic" OP's original questions: where would such information be represented in semver? Whatever probabilities you give to it

Attempting to extend the "semver skeptic" OP's original questions: where would such information be represented in semver? Whatever probabilities you give to it appearing in the major/minor/bugfix slot, the point is that the skeptic dev cannot safely assume that it will appear in the major slot. If it doesn't appear in the major slot, that means there is a mismatch between what the package author/maintainer considers to be backwards-compatibility and what the author assumes it is. Given the sad state of FLOSS documentation, this is a common type of mismatch where bugs hide. That means the skeptic dev has to pin to some version that they've tested, only upgrading for a critical bug or some feature valuable enough to warrant the increased time building tests for the new version and hunting for "mismatch" bugs. I think that skepticism characterizes a critical mass of npm usage. If that is indeed the case then those devs do not trust the minor and bugfix slots to convey meaningful backwards-compatibility information. There might as well be a single incrementing version integer with a changelog at that point. Edit: clarification