But woe unto the user who first starts using your library after a decade of that "evolution" and they are faced with a dozen functions that all have similar but increasingly long names and do very similar things with subtle but likely important differences. (I guess a culture of "the longest function name is probably the newest and the one you want" will emerge eventually.)
Personally, I like when a library's API represents the best way the author knows to tackle a given problem today without also containing an accumulated pile of how they thought the problem should have been tackled years ago before they knew better.
If I want the old solutions, that's what versioning is for. I'll use the old version.