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Scala breaks binary compatibility approximately every 2-3 years, which is fast by JVM standards but slow compared to most programming languages (e.g. Python releases an incompatible version every 1-2 years). You can blame Scala for at most one incompatibility in that long list; older versions of Scala are incompatible with Java 9+ (this is true for many JVM frameworks too, as Java 9 made breaking changes).

Scala's version is epoch.major.minor, not major.minor.patch. I though 2.12.(x+1) is generally binary compatible with 2.12.x. Or at least I personally never ran into that issue with Scala itself.

To be fair, most languages don't maintain backward binary compatibility.

In fact, this is so common that some package managers don't even bother distributing binaries: go modules, cargo, conan, etc.