From a plugin author perspective, claiming that it is somehow the responsibility of the author to notify users, without giving him tools to do that is kinda hypocritical.

Currently I want to release a new version of my plugin, to solve two annoying bugs that I estimate (based on the lack of complaints) that are not bugs people actually run into right now. Since I would like to release a new version in about two months, I don't want to force people to go through the upgrade process if they don't actually run into the bugs. What I would like to do is send them a message saying, there is a new version fixing some minor bug, if you are interested, get it from github.
Such a thing is impossible to do.

The way I see it, users of plugins downloaded from wordpress.org are not my users, they are wordpress.org's users, and it is wordpress.org responsibility to make them happy. It is not only plugin authors that don't have much value in what wordpress.org offers, users also do not find it very useful as a support channel, and many prefer to use alternative support channels, which in my case are actually not very easy to find.

Wordpress.org is google for plugins and themes, just slightly more than that, and the same way you don't expect google to notify you about changes to plugins you found by a google search, there is no reason to expect to get notifications from wordpress.org.
We have in our plugin, and I assume many other authors do the same, links to our twitter and FB account, so you will not even need to lets us know anything about you (except for your handle) to be able to keep track with what is going on with the plugin, and still not even 1% of the users follow us.

If users like Donna (nothing personal, just a name to use here) can't be bothered to do the minimal effort of following someone on the social networks they are already on, I am sorry, but I frankly can't care about how hard it is for them. This is just an entitlement problem, they don't want to do anything (not even talking about paying for someones work lol) but want to get everything.