A problem with SemVer I often see is that it's unclear whether a project adheres to it. You just can't assume every project having x.y.z version numbers uses semantic versioning.
Not necessarily. There are plenty of projects in their infancy that follow semver correctly. I'd argue that a project with a high major number is more likely to be indicative of improper usage.
I don’t think high major version number tells you that. Maybe they left 0.x.y (unstable) too early and were just honest with their early churn since which is as semver as you can get.
But one if the main semver violations I see in the wild is a project slotting major changes into the minor version number because they want to avoid high major version numbers for some reason or have some romantic idea of what a major version bump “should be”.
