Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it irritating when people quote semver like it’s some kind of law. It’s a random protocol someone came up with that some other people decided to follow. It’s nowhere near a de facto standard for version numbers: plenty of software has non-semver version numbers (in fact, this applies to all software I have worked on so far in my career!)
I think it's pretty clear semver doesn't really have a place in modern software. Except for Microsoft, no one cares about backwards compatibility, which semver is all about. All software is continually developed, every release contains both new features and bug fixes, which violates semver. The vast majority of software has a meaningless "1." or "0." tacked to the front to try to satisfy semver, until the project get…
Interesting. I'd characterise it more as 'responsibly breaking backwards compatibility'. Just a tool to communicate the nature of changes, a really (really) brief summarising changelog - what's included, breaking changes, non-breaking new features, or just misc. fixes?
I quite like it, but I tried to phrase my top-level comment not to be about it specifically. It would have surprised me to learn that Linux used 'semver' - that doesn't mean there's no semantic meaning to the version numbers it uses though.