This is to me just a post-semver and pre-semver language culture decision. Many of these crates would be on version 7 or whatever had they been developed in the

This is to me just a post-semver and pre-semver language culture decision. Many of these crates would be on version 7 or whatever had they been developed in the early-mid 2010s, but these days people have higher expectations of complete compatibility between 1.x versions compared to projects in say Python or Ruby when those languages were 7 years old which were happy enough that 1.8 was "compatible enough" with 1.7. There were some earlier hints of this, e.g. Flask was already the defacto Python web framework when it went 1.0 in 2018 after 8 years: https://palletsprojects.com/blog/flask-1-0-released/ https://palletsprojects.com/blog/flask-1-0-released/