Comment by jodedwards

The most important part of semver is that breaking changes are indicated by incrementing the major version. semver does not say that the major version must only be incremented when a breaking change is present.

I don't think they claim they are using semver. Lots of companies/projects use "major" releases just for the added hype.

Bugfixes can be breaking changes

Semver advocates hijacked the very common and pre-existing format of versions specified by dot-separated numbers, and then declared a specific meaning for it.

That’s nice for people who want to use that specific meaning, but it doesn’t mean that every instance of dot-separated version numbers is “semver”, nor that everyone who chooses not to follow these rules is “doing semver wrong”.

People write scripts that call ripgrep. That makes the arguments an API.

Semver is useful to indicate breaking API changes.

Not sure if they are following semver, but that is the argument for using semver in a cli tool.