Well, I’m proven wrong: I double-checked and ranges are not part of Semantic Versioning specification.
The issue is definitely on our side, when our plugin reads the version from the project manifest (package.json). It is passing the version verbatim to the React plugin; instead, it should coerce the version using the semver package to guarantee that the version sent to eslint-plugin-react is Semantic Versioning compatible.
I opened a Jira ticket about the issue.
Thanks a lot for reporting the issue. I think you can close the eslint-plugin-react GitHub issue and add a link to this thread, for future reference.
Eric.