I'd like to hear your alternative. What do you propose? That we stop even trying to tackle this problem, and all libraries are sequentially or date-versioned? And you can pin to, for example, library version built from march last year to today?

That would be a huge mess, IMO. Of course for non-libraries semver is fairly pointless, but for libraries it describes a contract and that contract works well in practice. But maybe there is a better way - hence my question.