The particular problem here is if you started out doing it wrong then changing your update behavior would break everyone's scripting around it. By changing the 'code version' everyones CI/CD system just keeps working the same way as any other package.

I understand, but you can just have a committed config file that tells which definitions version to use and/or URL to retrieve (so you can mirror it on your infra or serve a patched version for your use case).