[cortesoft]

This is assuming that just upgrading the shared library will work for everything. Too often, some things are broken by the upgrade, and since you weren't explicitly trying to update the thing that broke, you might not notice until a later date, at which point you may struggle to remember what was updated that it relies on.

[zdw]

I don't disagree that Hyrum's Law[1] is definitely a thing, but in practice with libraries that attempt SemVer or similar compatibility guarantees and understand that they'll be used in a shared library environment, breakage is not that common.

It also doesn't work for some ecosystems (like Go) where the practice is to prefer static linking.

1: https://www.hyrumslaw.com