Anchoring Software to Major Versions

In a SemVer world, major releases are those which contain incompatible API changes. We often see software projects anchor themselves to major versions for long periods of time, usually with the promise of stability. We all know how frustrating it is to upgrade a package and run into tons of breaking changes. Many of us have kept outdated software in production for longer than we should just because it can be such a pain to update. I've been thinking a lot about this lately in the context of open source proj