Sure, there will always be exceptions and I do agree that in those instances version numbering can be meaningful. However different projects follow different conventions and some projects don't even have a formal convention at all. So from a user perspective it's safer to assume no meaning for the majority of projects. Particularly when dealing with smaller community packages / modules pulled in from Puppet / npm / Go / whatever developer or DevOps tooling your project or business has adopted.

I'm really less concerned about larger projects like Apache which have a clear published versioning strategy because they're also the kind of projects that are less likely to bite you when doing what should be safe updates within minor / bugfix versions.