MAME is versioned no differently from Chrome. v0.276 might as well be called v276.

If Chrome was versioned 0.whatever I would agree.

Since it is not, you are factually wrong.

The 0. prat is irrelevant in MAME, you can see that both projects simply increment the number on every release. They could just as well do v<timestamp> and reap the same monotonically increasing thing with a temporality aspect as well.

It's just a number. What makes v102 more sane than vX.Y? It's just what you're used to and personal preference.

I'm with you about that ;)