We aren't planning to stop using semantic versioning for laravel/framework; however, it does frustrate me that it gives the illusion that Laravel is moving very fast when it actually has less breaking changes in major releases than ever.

People still struggle to understand that the release pace has never changed in many years - and in fact upgrading has gotten progressively easier with each release.

I still stand by my position that the old versioning system was actually better in general (for the framework itself - not for other packages like Cashier, Dusk, etc.). Let it be a lesson to open source maintainers to stick with your gut and don't give into pressure.