I agree with most of what you said.

> That is pretty common practice for a lot of software and especially packages on npm.

This is mostly what I have a problem with. Almost everyone is other ecosystems do not do something like this and there is a very good reason for it. Why not just follow a known and standard process of releasing things. https://twitter.com/maybekatz/status/966730802187792386

Even the NPM dev acknowledge the current process to be faulty and are considering switching to use pre-release tags.