I know you mentioned a company-backed example, but bear in mind most open source libs are given away and maintained for free. After a certain point people move on, so basically what do you expect to happen.
I created and maintained a couple libraries for 5+ years and it didn't really help my career or life in any way - no job offers, didn't matter to interviewers, so why would I bother?
Make a new package, or a distinctly different version of the original package that won't get imported by a simple upgrade.
Or am I missing some reason that it's not as simple to do this in front-end stuff as it is in other areas?
> Make a new package, or a distinctly different version of the original package that won't get imported by a simple upgrade.
Maybe some of this is cultural or habits, but I've seen projects that do like import "react-router": "latest", and with no package-lock... and I'm like WTF are you doing? That is a recipe for disaster pulling in latest major versions which by semver can and do have breaking changes.
That so many libs take advantage of semver is both good and bad.