What's your routine for versioning pre-releases?

While working on a big change, like "milestone 2.0", how do you, while working on it, version it before the main release? To keep it being 2.0.0 on release and not for example 2.130.0 (since it was "2.130.0-pre" just before release)?

Or is it my fantasy that when released to public it "should" always be *.0.0?

Major, minor, patch. See semver. 2.0.0 just means "we broke everything, your code may not be working anymore". 2.1.0 means "ok well there are some changes, but everything should be alright". 2.1.1 means "this one bug nobody cares about is now fixed".

Releases have whatever version they are on on deadline or "when you feel like releasing it".

Prereleases are bullshit imo and should just carry a beta flag or marked as prerelease, but not in the version string itself.