This is turning out to be a bad decision because there's been 5 major version bumps in the past year, yet the functionality in Electron hasn't materially changed very much, mostly bug fixes and minor changes.

Interested in why you think this was a bad decision. For a multitude of reasons surrounding security, performance and wanting the Latest And Greatest JS features we want to stay as close to upstream Chromium as possible. Curious what you feel the negative impact of major-versioning is?

For more info on our release cadence: https://www.electronjs.org/blog/12-week-cadence

The Electron version numbers are essentially meaningless now. I have no idea what even changed between Electron 4 and 8, the changelogs are all just bug fixes that didn't necessitate so many major version releases.

Also there are some NPM packages that have to create builds for specific versions of Electron, and those builds come out after Electron does, so I'm always 1 or 2 versions behind on Electron which leads into dependency hell situations.

Trying to stay up to date is exhausting.

With semantic versioning, you can tell the magnitude of the release (and if backwards compatibility is broken) by looking at the major version number.