In my central office, I have the latest version of Mariadb, 10.3, but I want to connect to all production servers and get a backup of all the objects, not data, from a single point. It turns out it's impossible to use mysqldump on any other version, like 10.2 because it uses ad-hoc commands that fail.
This is a bug. There is a flag called --compatible, and it does not consider the commands sent, only the output when it should also consider the commands sent to the server. We all need a version of mysqldump that can talk any version of mariadb, using the compatible flag.
Right now I face the task of creating three boxes to get a backup, one for each major version of MySQL. As you probably imagine, once an application is in production with a certain version, it never gets updated.