Agreed in part, I'd indeed want careful motivation and change management of such a change from my language or DB vendor -- JS/Python takes years for tinier sema

Agreed in part, I'd indeed want careful motivation and change management of such a change from my language or DB vendor -- JS/Python takes years for tinier semantic changes :) The average OSS project is just ~1 fulltime maintainer, maybe 2, with tiny drive-by contributors: there are great studies measuring this. Even most popular and long-lived OSS projects are more like that than Linux. The exceptions are inspiring, but most (my bet, I don't recall stats here) seem to be open core largely driven by 1 company. Something foundational with many contributors under open governance like Linux is better to discuss as an abnormality ("why can't the typical project grow to this size, maturity, tooling, and stability?"). So when talking about modern OSS, the typical case of looking through a pip or npm tree is NOT big shops and instead something closer to a network of volunteer passion project. From such individuals, I'm thankful for semvar, CHANGELOG, CI, and a few niceties like that. From there, the history of BREAKING would signal the project moves too fast for us or with too big swings, or looks more acceptable.