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If you are writing applications that directly call OS ABIs you are doing it wrong.

In the OpenBSD and Apple worlds, you can change an ABI because applications are expected to, as they should, call libc and similar platform abstraction libraries instead, and these libraries are dynamically linked.

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It’s not just those two - probably every mature system on the planet except Linux defines the system interface at the library level, not the syscall level.

By that definition Windows is freely changing ABI too, since the only defined interfaces are libraries like the KernelBase.dll or netapi32.dll.

But that only shifts the maintenance burden. Anytime Windows changes its inner working that means that every existing library has to be changed to expose the same interface to old code, including being bug-compatible and supporting all the abuses of undocumented features (or at least those used in software used by relevant clients).

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