This is so fascinating I remember Apple's transition to versioning by year and thinking to myself "I wonder if anyone's standardized an approach to this in a more deterministic / calculated way"?
Easy on the integrator, easy on the maintainer, that's the idea. Especially with agents reading changelogs these days, time is the best human-legible heuristic.
Not sure how embarrassed to be by this, but when I don't recall knowing that when I first published calver.org. Despite having read the semver doc a dozen times at least...
A decade already, and the times have never been more timely. Apple, Nvidia, and many more on board, don't forget to check out the long-overdue timeline: https://calver.org/timeline.html