I like that you compare the Hugo project with Apple, but we’re a little bit smaller…
The one thing we signal by not going 1.x is that we’re kind of not “1.0 feature complete”. People tend to think a major version would get a more stable version, which I’m not sure is always the case. I suspect you end up with major version increments and, due to lack of human resources, not so much backports of bugfixes to the previous version(s).