This is going in circles because ya’ll are saying the same thing while saying the exact opposite thing at the same time. Let’s make this more precise. Almost no packages directly break with Julia’s minor releases. Those that do tend to be those that interact with compiler internals, specifically Zygote, Enzyme, Cassette, etc. those packages. However, there are a lot of packages which use those packages, and thus indirectly need a bump upon a new Julia minor release because the updated dependency.
Therefore, almost no packages directly break with a Julia release, but a large swath of packages get an update that makes them no longer backwards compatible in all ways. Both are true.
With that being said, the maintenance burden of a Julia update is not very large unless you’re hacking on one of the parts interacting with the compiler. But it does mean that, in its current stage, the ecosystem “has to move on” from older versions since the dependency bumps effectively lead to support gaps where the next 1.x+1 will have one set of packages while the 1.x will be on a different set of dependencies.