> If the GNU folks want to remove the wrapper scripts, they can. It's their software and they write the best practices for it.

I'm not making any argument about the maintainer's rights. I am making an argument about whether it was a good technical decision.

> [people can work around it]

That doesn't make it a good idea, though.

> Microsoft has deprecated and removed tons of stuff and so did browsers.

Only when there was a real benefit deemed greater than the cost.

In this case there is essentially no benefit whatsoever to the change, except some abstract notion of cleanliness or pedantic spec compliance.