2.18.0 attempts to start us on the road to properly Semantic Version (semver). In the last few patch releases, there were technically things that should cause a minor version bump, but were numbered as a patch.
Even if just one api is newly added, semver requires that we bump the minor version. The forceReconnect api is an example of one api being added to the Connection interface. It should have resulted in a minor version bump.
Going forward, when a release contains only bug fixes, it's appropriate to simply bump the patch. But if an api is added, even one, then the minor version will be bumped.