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A less-used reason for bumping a plugin's version number is to trigger a cache purge after changing language strings or GraphQL schema. This isn't necessary, as all caches are purged on any upgrade – so new lang strings and schemas will always take effect on upgrade to the next minor release, even if the specific plugin's version hasn't changed.
Adding a new feature to a minor release
When we develop new features, we tend to use the current date as the version number because the feature is added to the development branch. However, when backporting a new feature to a previous major release, it is important to give it a major version that matches the rest of the release, in order to leave room for independent upgrade steps in the future.
So if a new plugin for the development branch has the version '2023031400', and it gets backported to Totara 17, the t17-release version should be '2022110800'.