In software engineering the statement "interfaces, not implementations" has been used for a long time (certainly at least Robert "Uncle Bob" C. Martin started teaching), which is a generalization on the "we don't break userspace". In essence it cooks down to declaring an interface without announcing or depending on the implementation. With OOP languages like C++, a code base would aggressively use interfaces as types, never concrete class types (which implement the interface), so that it can make it easier to reason about how and whether the program behaves when one implementation of an interface is swapped for another.
With Linux, which is a C codebase by and large, they load and pass pointers to structures to kernel procedures which can do as they please -- as long as the documentation on said structures (which usually says which fields and how are retained with which values and so on) remains unchanged. That's their "object oriented programming" (yeah, I know Linus would likely have hated the comparison).