I think everything you said is totally correct for open source library owners.
But let me offer a different perspective: Hyrum’s law is neither a technical contract nor a social contract. It’s an emergent technical property in a sufficiently used system.
How you respond to that emergent property depends on the social context.
If you are a FOSS maintainer, and an optimization speeds up 99.99% of users and requires 0.01% to either fix their code or upgrade to a new API, you ship it.
If you are working at a big tech company, you need both the optimization and breaking 0% of the company. So you will work across teams to find the sweet spot.
If you are an enterprise software company, and you change breaks 0.1% if users, but that user is one of the top 5 contracts, you don’t ship.
Seems like you're saying the same thing, just using "social contract" differently. I think they use social contract not to mean binding, but to highlight the fact that Hyrums Law must be taken in the social context of the project. In the case of large SW company, the social contract would be to not break services, even when folks are misusing an API. And for a popular open source project, it would mean not breaking a widely used behavior, even if it isn't specified or officially supported. Determining the social contract seems to be precisely what you describe as "not a social contract".
But let me offer a different perspective: Hyrum’s law is neither a technical contract nor a social contract. It’s an emergent technical property in a sufficiently used system.
How you respond to that emergent property depends on the social context.
If you are a FOSS maintainer, and an optimization speeds up 99.99% of users and requires 0.01% to either fix their code or upgrade to a new API, you ship it.
If you are working at a big tech company, you need both the optimization and breaking 0% of the company. So you will work across teams to find the sweet spot.
If you are an enterprise software company, and you change breaks 0.1% if users, but that user is one of the top 5 contracts, you don’t ship.