Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see your point. But so far we didn't hear many complaints about this feature from the users. The main problem is in forgetting to version code that changed. But the system has protections against such cases. It doesn't end up in spaghetti code as old branches are proactively removed after they are not needed anymore. Temporal provides APIs that allow to count number of workflows using each version. I don't think it…
You might find the concept of Edit Lenses to be useful. A good writeup is: https://www.inkandswitch.com/cambria.html
A workflow is not just externally stored data with a well-defined schema. It is the computation's whole state, including threads blocked on API calls and local variables on the stack. So it is not possible to define translations between different versions the way Edit Lenses do.