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by pags 3937 days ago
I think it means that the API is stable, it's not related to how well the software works.
1 comments

Node's API stability is a wonderful and many-layered thing. While more and more of the API is moving towards stability in the colloquial "is this going to change between versions?" sense, it's still a mixture.

See this section of the node docs for a description of the different classifications of 'stability' within the API: https://nodejs.org/api/documentation.html#documentation_stab...

Those are classifications, but are they definitions? It's still not clear to me that "stability" has much to do with the software performing in a consistent matter. Either way it's a careless choice of wording, I've never encountered anybody who saw the word "unstable" attached to a node.js release and understood that it might refer to the API (see surrounding comments).