I wonder if you'd say the same if the team changing the API would be Googles and the teams constantly having to scramble to unbreak their code would be an opensource project.
Half the benefit of having open source drivers is so that the kernel team can update the drivers themselves when they change the API. I don't think there would be a lot of complaints from open source developers if Google were to change one of their APIs while submitting high quality patches to update all the open source projects that use it.