Deprecating is not removing. Deprecating a method breaks nothing. It just shows a deprecation warning when you use it and have deprecation warnings turned on.
And that's a good thing! Do not hold on to broken cruft but give some time (more than just a few months (Ansible and other culprits) but definitely less tan 10 years (Python 3 transition)) for code maintainers to handle it.
Removing “broken cruft” from a programming language’s standard library has a very high cost associated with it. If you look at Java, the list of things removed in the past decade is quite short [0], and the removed things probably weren’t super important or popular. Python’s deletionists go too far IMO.
