It doesn't need everyone to follow it; it just needs library maintainers to declare when they do follow it, actually mean it when they do, and check their own d

It doesn't need everyone to follow it; it just needs library maintainers to declare when they do follow it, actually mean it when they do, and check their own dependencies for breaking changes. ie a library that declares it uses semver should create an abstraction barrier around all of its dependencies, such that the user should only need to care about declared breakages in their direct dependencies.