The Julia General registry is locally stored as a tar.gz and has version info for all registered packages, so I tried this out for Julia packages. The top 5 are:
DiffEqBase 6.189.1
LoopVectorization 0.12.172
Reactant 0.2.161
Mooncake 0.4.159
Distributions 0.25.120
Caveats/constraints: Like the post, this ignores non-SemVer packages (which mostly used date-based versions) and also jll (binary wrapper) packages which just use their underlying C libraries' versions. Among jlls, the largest that isn't a date afaict is NEO_jll with 25.31.34666+0 as its version.
You might want to try a different storing strategy. 0.25 is above 0.4. These are, I believe, what are called in Unix flags "human numbers".
I understood the list is ordered by biggest number, aka 189 > 172 > 161 > 159 > 120
I think in semver 0.4 usually means 0.04, not 0.40..., so it should be lower than 0.25.
Edit: nevermind, I misunderstood your point
This would seem to imply that the vast majority of Julia packages are 0.x?
There are many that are, but I feel like your comment is based on the same faulty assumption as your sibling comment - that this is an ordering of version numbers as a whole. It's not, the ordering is on the same basis as in the post, the largest single number within the MAJOR.Minor.patch trio.