BTW I hope any project won’t increase the Z version only by including Dependabot commits, it would be insane.
Release must be documented, tested, with CHANGELOG updated.
If some maintainers just accept Dependabot commits without checking, move away. That’s just simple crappy auto-merge.
It's not a must [unless you put it into a contract], it's a should or would be nice
Many, if not most, projects don't follow a good, obvious, transparent, documented release or change management.
I wish for it, too, but it's not the reality of projects. Most people don't seem to care about it as much as I do.
I agree blind acceptance/merging is problematic. But for some projects (small scope/size/personal-FOSS, trustworthy upstream) I see it as pragmatic rather than problematic.