This is not really a strategy, but rather a consequence of LLVM having hundreds of developers, most of which use LLVM upstream, and therefore don't care about m

This is not really a strategy, but rather a consequence of LLVM having hundreds of developers, most of which use LLVM upstream, and therefore don't care about maintaining an API compatibility that they themselves do not need. It turns out that it is impossible to convince people working on LLVM on their free time or academics to invest part of their time on "preserving" API compatibility instead of adding new features, fixing bugs, or improving perf, for the benefit of companies that don't want to contribute their improvements to the community.