> That's not how people used to do decimal-based versioning.
“Completely arbitrary, utterly inconsistent (across vendors, across products from the same vendor, and even within the same product over time) and often marketing driven” is how people used to do decimal versioning, and any claim to the contrary is romanticizing a very messy past.
The grandparent's description is a perfectly reasonable example of what would actually happen.
You can't expect anything from version numbers used for marketing purposes anyway, in fact it was also frequent for such products to have internal version numbers that are much more consistent (e.g. Windows). You can do the exact same thing with the semantic versioning---you don't have to increment by exactly one. That practice is irrelevant here.
“Completely arbitrary, utterly inconsistent (across vendors, across products from the same vendor, and even within the same product over time) and often marketing driven” is how people used to do decimal versioning, and any claim to the contrary is romanticizing a very messy past.
The grandparent's description is a perfectly reasonable example of what would actually happen.