I was thinking something more like using a versioning system to track breaking changes and not running away from them like they are the plague.

Sometimes making breaking changes is necessary and people seem to think that nostr cannot afford to make them since "it's too late". I think it's quite the contrary, nostr is very early in it's development and clinging to bad decisions might not pan out great.

Perhaps a combination of this

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/issues/608

with NIPs or protocol wide SemVer like here

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/704

could be a start.