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Well put, and this particular problem can easily be handled by having a prominent doc section called "Information for packagers" that outlines all this stuff. This isn't a new problem and seems to be best handled by engaging with the packagers and putting a small amount of effort into helping them, it's easy and pays enormous dividends.

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The "information for packagers" doc section is often referred to as a Makefile.

It enumerates minimum versions of shared libraries, as well as explicit versions of static libraries.

The problem isn't with minimum versions, the problem is with maximum versions, which are potentially unknown at the time a project is released, i.e. the code works with the latest real ease of a library, but a future release of the library may break the project.

The only real way to avoid that is for a project to include a bunch of compliance tests, that validate that an underlying library correctly performs the operations the project needs it to do. But this is actually a lot of work, so in reality it will almost never be done. Which leads us back to the discussion about the wisdom of packagers changing libs without understanding the on downstream projects.

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