You're certainly going to see that and other policies get broken, but only because we don't see everything. There's far too much content here for us to read it all.
For sure they can - in fact that was the issue with the current thread.
From an HN perspective the important thing is not the version number, nor even the significance of the release, but how recently the project last had a major discussion.
There's one workaround for this that might work sometimes: if software has undergone major recent work that is interesting in its own right, then an article devoted to the specifics of that particular project—the why and the how, with interesting technical details, and an explanation of that makes it hard and also what pain it solves / what makes it worth doing—might have a chance of generating a more specific discussion in the comments. That's what I would do if I had a big release that I hoped to get attention for on HN.
Even then, people are likely to mostly post generically about the project—just as announcements of new things from $BigCo tend to attract lots of generic discussion about $BigCo too. But if there aren't too many of those, we can downweight them and then the more specific comments can hopefully float to the top.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
The problem with changing that policy is that the front page would see a massive influx of "Foo 1.2.3 release" stories. This would not be a step in the direction of the global optimum (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).