@mekeor @cwebber That might be true for some devices, but I have compared booting with and without microcode and it has made no difference on my CPU. The only time I've seen it bump version numbers is when I upgrade my UEFI. This is also on a system which I have run many different distros on, and I have tried it on multiple ones, so I doubt it's that any one of them are applying them wrong.
For reference I specifically compared version numbers, because I know that Linux mitigates these issues in other (less performant ways) if it detects old firmware.