Both things can be true. It can be true that we (the Rust team, I am on libs-api) are careful about what we claim while the "plain English" version of it is also true. I explained the mitigation measures we take, and it is quite good at telling us whether a change is going to break people, even if it is strictly acceptable from our API evolution policy.

I'm not trying to make a just a dumb semantic point here. We really do take the literal notion of breaking change seriously too.

The last time I myself experienced a breaking change was maybe 5 or 6 years ago. Neither ripgrep 0.2.0 nor 0.3.0 compile on current Rust. Although neither of the breaking changes came from library APIs.