This overacceptance of external dependencies and compatibility-breaking API changes all started with the shift from software-as-product to software-as-a-service. Honestly it feels like the resulting churn and busywork is on some level a deliberate ploy to create more job security for software devs.
I don't think it's a deliberate ploy: it's a micro-optimization that's localised to the team/company building the API/product, and it improves efficiency at that level.
You can really build and maintain only a single version of your product, forgetting about maintaining old versions. This means pushing backwards compatibility challenges onto your customers (eg. other developers for an API) — the fact that customers have accepted that tells us that the optimization is working, though I am very much not a fan.
