I could be wrong about this, but I think it mostly just comes down to the maintainers of libraries and software packages. If you've got a less used or less kno

I could be wrong about this, but I think it mostly just comes down to the maintainers of libraries and software packages. If you've got a less used or less known software package and an upstream library dev makes a breaking change, you've got a choice, stick with the old version or update your code to work with the new version. As time passes, new projects are started on the new version, the new version gets picked up by distro maintainers, old version is slowly phased out as more devs use the newer version. Eventually, maintaining old version and new version in package repos is too much effort to be worth it, old version gets removed, any software stuck on the old version is now broken on that distro without a bunch of workarounds. And essentially, this is happening all the time with most libraries and such.