My point is that deprecation is by its very nature going to hurt something that isn’t prepared for its demise.
There is no good way to do it. There are only less bad ways to do it.
They don’t care if you sympathize. The business or institution decides how it wants to prioritize replacement, and some projects miss deadlines.
If you think that every application running in an enterprise has stopped using Flash, you’re sorely mistaken.
> My point is that deprecation is by its very nature going
> to hurt something that isn’t prepared for its demise.
You're describing the end of Life of Adobe Flash that hits at the end of 2020.
Deprecation is different from EOL (Flash has been deprecated for some time now), and deprecating/EOLing a creation tool/product line has little similarity with tooling to deprecate internal APIs gracefully.
Although I do think that you and TFA agree on how difficult it is to deprecate functionality that folks rely on, it seems like you're talking about two wildly different facets of that statement.