Documents the unified versioning convention adopted across all
publishable artifacts: how to publish (operator), how to verify a
deployed release (consumer), what each tier means, where the contract
lives. Written last so it reflects what actually shipped, not what
was planned.
Pairs with shared/release/README.md (operator-internal contract) —
this file is for first-time contributors trying to understand "why
do I get five inputs when I run the publish workflow?".
