I recently learned that Windows binaries contain metadata for what version they are (among other things, presumably). I was discussing in-progress work on making a mod manager for a popular game work on Linux with the author of the tool, and they mentioned that one of the things that surprised them was not being able to rely on inspection of a native library used by most mods to determine what version they had installed on Linux like they could on Windows. It had never occurred to them that this wasn't a first-class feature of Linux binary formats, and I was equally surprised to find out that it was a thing on Windows given that I haven't regularly used Windows since before I really had much of a concept of what "metadata in a binary format" would even mean.

Are you talking about the "Linux version" it targets or the version of the library? If its the latter, then it is the case, that versioning works per symbol instead of per library, so that a newer library can still contain the old symbols. If you want the latest version a library implements, you could search all symbols and look for the newest symbol version.

If you want it the other way around you could look at the newest symbol the library wants.