Wow, coming from the webdev world. It is so funny seeing NGINX, one of the widest used web servers in the world, on version 1.x. React is on version 19. Really shows how differently new vs. old software is designed and built, and not necessarily in a good way.
anyone can choose any version string convention they want for their project. Comparing two different pieces of software by their version string doesn't make sense.
I chalk that up more to different versioning schemes rather than how much work is being done. If nginx changed whole numbers like react did, I bet it would be even higher.