I suspect they meant the other way around - 1.2.18 is always newer than 1.1.10. But if you're running 1.1.18 and see 1.2.10, it would be nice if it were easy to tell wmhether your bug from 1.1.18 is potentially fixed in 1.2.10 or not.

Actually I didn't. Perhaps the 1.1.x branch is for legacy clients and only gets the occasional crucial backport, where the 1.2.x branch is the active you-should-use-this-one-for-new-stuff version, and sees frequent feature releases. It is the very treatment of semver as being equivalent to a monotonically increasing decimal that I object to.