But it does prepare you for the scale of potential breakage? I always just saw semver as a scale of the possibility something could break without any guarantees

But it does prepare you for the scale of potential breakage? I always just saw semver as a scale of the possibility something could break without any guarantees. Major change is highly likely, minor change is potentially and patch is shouldn't but give it a quick check. That doesn't make it meaningless, it just makes it not black and white. No change no matter how small should give anyone confidence that something won't break. I don't think it reduces the value of semver though. It's just another attempt in a long line of attempts to categorise changes into something quickly digestible and it does that well enough.