> I think you mean "makes it impossible to know if a release includes backwards incompatible changes without looking at the release notes, while still having a release number say nothing about other aspects of the significance of a release."

The compatibility guarantees of CockroachDB do not change with this. It's always been the same: version X+1 will remain backward compatible with X but may break compatibility with X-1. Deprecation notices for definitive changes in version X+2 are introduced in version X.