I don’t understand this argument. Dates are arbitrary, and are subject to how quickly something is released/iterated on. Was there 2 releases a year? Once every two years? It’s hard to understand between different versions how many major potential changes there are.

For something like macOS, the number of fundamental under the hood changes are tremendous, coming from a super large organization. Without semantic versioning, it is difficult to create dependencies or explain compatibility, let alone understand how “old” a version someone might be on —- time itself is subjective, while an incrementing counter is not.