As I understand it, the hard-lock of Shell extension compatibility lists to Shell version was turned off several releases ago (my memory is fuzzy on exactly when), but turned back on for GNOME 40. Are there plans to turn this back off again?
I’m not advocating either way, but looking what we should do in Fedora for policies around extensions packaged in the distribution. The current state is that we don’t carry any of this dependency information into the package management system, so extensions just stop working on upgrade unless they happen to have been updated first.
Howdy! I was the one who started conversations on the initial version checking the first time to turn them off and then turning them on again around GNOME 40.
I don’t think we want to move back to no version checking. One good reason is that from GNOME 41 onward - things like prefs for extensions will require using GTK4. I think @ewlsh can also weigh in here. He’s working on some things that when merged into shell will likely break things as well.
So the answer is no, we are going to stay on version checking and it will be unlikely that we will change back. It’s possible we might look into a granular local override but no discussions have happened around that.