There’s nothing special about v1, there’s no reason to keep a useless zero for a decade. At some point you gotta realize you’ve been using the minor version as a major so that v0.39.0 is just v39.0.
Apple recently realized the same thing when they stopped releasing 10.x versions and just did 11.0 after 20 years.
Which is exactly what happened when Big Sur was released.
Apple using semantic versioning is a huge win.
As long as releases happen I don't think you can say the devs are afraid of commitment.
Note that this only applies to self contained software. For libraries SemVer makes sense but other types of software usually don't need it.
For my projects I usually just show the major version to the common user and internally SemVer is used for debug information and compatibility signalling (where this applies).