Game launcher shader mechanism?

Does anybody know if current launcher is switching shader folders because of a different game version/build only or is it actually checking the rendering pipeline to see if it needs to? Because different drivers can change the shader compilation enough that it needs to be regenerated. Depending on the how the launcher is doing it, it might not realize that shaders need to be regen'ed.

Ran into this previously on an Nvidia driver update wondering why performance was so bad sometimes. I noticed that some games recompiled shaders on something as simple as a windows update and it made me kinda pay more attention to what triggered it. Realized the pattern of basically any combination of bios, vbios, cpu, gpu, drivers, windows updates, settings, can affect the way shaders are generated.

I copied the above from a post reply i made on Reddit but realized that maybe someone here would actually know the answer? I haven't looked deeply into the whole shader management recently. I just know it went from nothing to making new folders when there's an update (... why not delete?!?!)