Hello, Sorry for the delay in my response.
Lintian is maintained in a backward incompatible way, in the sense that the latest version published in unstable can't be used to verify packages that are to be uploaded in stable.
That's because, as far as I understand, Policy changes are not to be applied retroactively to the current stable (or oldstable) releases.
This means packages that are to be uploaded to stable should use the latest Lintian version in stable. If there's a bug with that version, a fix will be issued via the stable proposed-updates mechanism, for example:
https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/commit/9d4daee3a72db19a4825a3a93077ec9f71205136 (I've poked Maytham wrt why this isn't in the archive yet :P). Hope this answers your question? -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Louis-Philippe Véronneau ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋ po...@debian.org / veronneau.org ⠈⠳⣄
