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When vendors were releasing their Lisp implementations with ASDF, they had to basically never change version because neither upgrade nor downgrade was possible without breaking something for someone, and no obvious upgrade path was visible and recommendable.
With ASDF 2, upgrade is possible, easy and can be recommended. This means that vendors can safely ship a recent version of ASDF, confident that if a user isn’t fully satisfied, he can easily upgrade ASDF and deal with a supported recent version of it. This means that release cycles will be causally decoupled, the practical consequence of which will mean faster convergence towards the latest version for everyone.