> The old operating model was indeed fine in a much smaller, simpler tech world,

The thing with the 'old days' that does not happen now is developers would go out of their way to make sure new releases were API backward compatible. Now it seems anything goes. If the API changed, a new function may be created or the old function would use variable arguments to allow the older functionality.

With that said, providing backward compatibility seems to be hard these days due to a BOM (Bill of material/dependencies) that make a BOM of submarine look simple.

That ssh/xz issue kind of highlighted how complex things have gotten.