I'm reminded of a blog post I once read, which annoyingly I now cannot find, on how the job of a library maintainer is to not break the API. If you break the API, you've failed at your job. This mindset makes more sense than treating API breakages as a routine case-by-case decision. As the article puts it, breaking changes are breaking the library's commitments. (The library/service distinction doesn't matter much here.)

I remember that same old blog post also lamented overhearing a conversation in which a developer bragged about how their idea for a change was so good that everyone agreed to break the library API to implement it. This reminds me of how a startup being 'highly disruptive' is sometimes fetishised as an end in itself, but of course it's even worse than that: they're celebrating undermining the library's dependability.