Regularly occurring major versions, with only a small amount of changes, has actually kind of become seen as best practice in the JavaScript community. React, Node, Angular and a ton of other popular tools now release a major version update every year or 6 months. The reasoning is that by taking small, backward-incompatible steps, then developers are more likely to make the effort to install the latest update.

To understand the problems the community is trying to avoid, one only needs to go back to 2015-2016, when Angular 2 was released. At the time, AngularJS (aka Angular 1) was extremely hot; it had in record time become THE framework for any front-end developer to learn, and it looked set to dominate the landscape for years. And then, Angular 2 came out and it had a TON of changes. The learning curve of some elements of Angular 2 was very high for the average developer (TypeScript, reactive programming). And worst of all, the "migration path" from AngularJS to Angular 2 essentially amounted to a rewrite of your front-end application. Most never bothered updating their app, and most devs moved away from Angular, especially when React was released. All of that AngularJS experience that we accumulated became "outdated" in the span of about a year.