It's definitely a thing. It's easier to see with applications that use a lock file rather than libraries that always try to fetch the latest dependencies. That's because there have been incompatible changes made, but within the "allowed breakage" policy. For example, try checking out 0.2.0 or 0.3.0 of ripgrep and building it with Rust 1.33. Both fail for different reasons. The former fails because rustc-serialize 0.3.19 was using an irrefutable pattern in a method without a body, and this was prohibited: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/37378 However, if you run `cargo update` first, then the build succeeds.
The 0.3.0 checkout fails because of a change in Cargo. Specifically, I think it used to define OUT_DIR while compiling the build script, but this was not intentional. It was only supposed to be set when running the build script. ripgrep 0.3.0 got caught here in the time after when the bug was introduced but before it was fixed. See: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/3368 In this case, cargo update doesn't solve this. You cannot build ripgrep 0.3.0 with any recent version of the compiler. You need to go back to a version of the Rust distribution which ships a Cargo version that sets OUT_DIR when compiling build scripts. (Or, more likely, patch build.rs since it's a trivial fix.)
Of course, both of these things are fine on their own. But strictly speaking, from a user experience point of view, code does break from time to time. With that said, ripgrep 0.4.0 and newer all compile on Rust 1.33, and ripgrep 0.4.0 was released over two years ago. So, strictly speaking, it does show the GP is wrong in at least some circumstances. :-)
The 0.3.0 checkout fails because of a change in Cargo. Specifically, I think it used to define OUT_DIR while compiling the build script, but this was not intentional. It was only supposed to be set when running the build script. ripgrep 0.3.0 got caught here in the time after when the bug was introduced but before it was fixed. See: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/3368 In this case, cargo update doesn't solve this. You cannot build ripgrep 0.3.0 with any recent version of the compiler. You need to go back to a version of the Rust distribution which ships a Cargo version that sets OUT_DIR when compiling build scripts. (Or, more likely, patch build.rs since it's a trivial fix.)
Of course, both of these things are fine on their own. But strictly speaking, from a user experience point of view, code does break from time to time. With that said, ripgrep 0.4.0 and newer all compile on Rust 1.33, and ripgrep 0.4.0 was released over two years ago. So, strictly speaking, it does show the GP is wrong in at least some circumstances. :-)