> because doing new things is hard and hardware has deadlines that software doesn't.

It was nothing new tho. They broke existing software. This is caught by basic software regression test. That's engineering 101.

Seems to me like it was an explicit design decision that fixed some use cases and broke others, rather than a regression in the sense of "A bug we introduced but didn't catch." As such a regression test wouldn't have caught this.

Someone made a design decision that broke some use cases.