That's an unhelpful description of the situation - there's been no request to put this change into stretch-backports. Stretch is a stable release, changes don't go in without a reason. Other people using this package in Stretch have obviously not had problems with the version in Stretch.
We can request an upload to stretch-backports of the fixed version in buster. This is how Debian works - packages in testing (currently buster) can go into stable-backports (currently stretch-backports), once that work is requested.
That gives us a change of limited impact which can be properly staged, validated and implemented and which won't change underneath us later.