That certainly depends on who's using the code. I've worked on both APIs used by other developers and software used directly by end-users. For the latter, dates

That certainly depends on who's using the code. I've worked on both APIs used by other developers and software used directly by end-users. For the latter, dates would have worked much better than version numbers since the end-users couldn't choose what version they used anyway and version numbers didn't mean anything to them. For APIs or libraries, yeah, semver is cool and dandy, but not all code is APIs or libraries.