You know what you could also do? Don't break backwards compatibility. I know it sounds strange (if you're coming from modern JS development) but many ecosystems

You know what you could also do? Don't break backwards compatibility. I know it sounds strange (if you're coming from modern JS development) but many ecosystems actually pull that off, like the entirety of Windows, or 99% of the ecosystem in Clojure/Script. Then if you have over the years collected a bunch of incompatible changes that you would like to do, you create a new library with a new name, and do all the changes there. Now you have the first library absolutely never breaking compatibility, and the second one for your "I absolutely must change the API interface here" changes. There are some good ideas around versioning here as well (by Rich Hickey): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyLBGkS5ICk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyLBGkS5ICk > just messy because it's new. I'm sure better tooling will eventually emerge. I don't understand this. Either a new solution is better and we try to use that, or the solution is worse and we should avoid it. If it's worse, why should we build better tooling when we can just use a good solution from the get-go?