For the record, what was suggested in the email linked above has already been done in 10.3 at least:

mariadb-10.3/debian$ grep Package control
Package: libmariadb-dev
Package: libmariadb-dev-compat
Package: libmariadb3
Package: libmariadb3-compat
Package: libmariadbclient18
Package: libmysqlclient18
Package: libmariadbd-dev
Package: libmariadbd19
Package: mysql-common
Package: mariadb-common
Package: mariadb-client-core-10.3
Package: mariadb-client-10.3
Package: mariadb-server-core-10.3
Package: mariadb-server-10.3
Package: mariadb-server
Package: mariadb-client
Package: mariadb-plugin-connect
Package: mariadb-plugin-rocksdb
Package: mariadb-plugin-oqgraph
Package: mariadb-plugin-tokudb
Package: mariadb-plugin-mroonga
Package: mariadb-plugin-spider
Package: mariadb-plugin-gssapi-server
Package: mariadb-plugin-gssapi-client
Package: mariadb-backup
Package: mariadb-plugin-cracklib-password-check
Package: mariadb-test
Package: mariadb-test-data

Only server and client remain versioned so that sysadmins can choose if they want to stay on a particular version or depend on the versionless package name and always have their systems upgrade to latest MariaDB.