From: Justin Forbes on gitlab.com https://gitlab.com/cki-project/kernel-ark/-/issues/39#note_547725975
The decision to drop `<N>` to 1 was made after 5.12 started as the numbers are climbing inconsistently with what we want. Realistically 100/200/300 have special meaning for Fedora stable releases, and rawhide should always be below 100. As to moving the `<N>` to before the rc, I don't have particularly strong opinion on it, it has always been used just before the fedora release for well over a decade at this point, so that was where it was kept when we added the git tag. Though `<N>` was typically '1'. For instance:
kernel-5.6.0-0.rc2.git2.1.fc33 kernel-3.0-0.rc6.git0.1.fc16
My only concern might be that someone has a script somewhere expecting behavior that has existed for over a decade.