Unpopular opinion: Maybe `stateVersion` shouldn't exist at all

[Adda]

Just a few days ago, there was an interesting proposal trying to fix stateVersion at least a little bit. Relevant and interesting read, including the discussion:

Incrementally salvaging stateVersion

system.stateVersion is widely acknowledged to be an imperfect thing. I’d like to propose incrementally augmenting it with a less imperfect thing. Problems I want to address: Users, new and old, perennially want to update system.stateVersion. We can tell them not to until we’re blue in the face, but there’s a certain kind of OCD computer toucher who simply cannot allow anything that looks like a date in their system config to be more than a year old; and the NixOS community has, I would wager,…