That’s why you can remove the file that it’s stored in and it will recreate on the build. I think adding a bit of manual friction (sudo rm /etc/stateVersion before rebuild) is fine to stop newbies from changing it without reading the comment. It’s like -b backup for home-manager. Actually I do see newbies just running sudo rm /etc/stateVersion anyways, so not as good of an idea as I thought when posting.
Agreed on the part about “The actual problem with stateVersion” though. Really this thread is just a less constructive version of Incrementally salvaging stateVersion.