yeah, but you omitted the ends of the quotes. the first ends with "with no foreseeable end to the pain", whereas the latter ends with "that will hurt a lot at first but slowly fade away over time"

the least worst thing might be to enable painless ABI transition, but that is often incredibly hard (as in not worth the trouble) and brings about its own set of pain spots and pitfalls that most casual users are not prepared to deal with, so it doesn't even avoid the pain

so making lots of such incompatible fixes and improvements at once, painful as it is, is probably the least painful approach overall

and then, most of the pain arises because of code that one can't or doesn't want to recompile (e.g., because it's proprietary and you don't have source code to recompile)