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Your reply is conflating two different things: updates to games, and updates to Proton. IME Proton updates almost never result in regressions (I think I've heard of it happening once, maybe twice ever), and Valve has and uses the ability to prefer specific Proton versions for specific games.

Game updates are what I have read about breaking compatibility with Proton. In this case AFAICT Valve's only option is to try to fix it with a Proton patch. I don't think Valve's standard distribution agreement gives them the right to distribute whatever old version of a publisher's game Valve feels like. Most games I've seen, Steam enforces automatic updates to the latest version. Pinning a previous version is such a rare use case, it is confusingly under the "Betas" tab of the game properties when it is even available to the user.

Even when Valve has the rights to arbitrarily pick an old version of the game to distribute, the only way to find out if an update is breaking is to test it, so if the developer doesn't test it, the players do. So either way, if Proton isn't a target platform, you have a higher risk of breaking bugs making it in front of players. I guess since serious bugs make it into release so frequently on supported platforms, this may not seem like an issue, but there is a very real psychological phenomenon where when software breaks on Windows, it is the software's fault, and when software breaks on Linux, it is Linux's fault.