I think religious following of semver doesn't matter, but
semver says that pre 1.0 numbers are essentially meaningless so nodejs might be actually following it correctly.
> Major version zero (0.y.z) is for initial development. Anything may change at any time. The public API should not be considered stable.
> if your software is being used in production, it should probably already be 1.0.0. If you have a stable API on which users have come to depend, you should be 1.0.0. If you're worrying a lot about backwards compatibility, you should probably already be 1.0.0.
So, either they are using 0.y.z to allow themselves breaking changes whenever, or they are using it as a signal that it's not production-ready, or they are not following semantic versioning.
