As an update, I wrote a new blog post explaining our future plans.
We will be following quite closely with what Go Modules recommends, although our definition of semantic versioning has been modified to be more flexible with API changes while being way more strict about data format changes.
Thanks again to all of the people in this thread for your help and understanding!
Let me know if you have any feedback on the new approach.
This sounds like a highly fraught decision for external consumers of badger - allowing API breakage on minor versions violates the contract that the wider development community has come to rely on, and largely invalidates the goals of semantic import paths.