If you look at the POSIX standard that removes fgrep & egrep [1], then you can see that most of the utilities being removed there really are quite obscure things.

In light of that, then another (perhaps more charitable) way to look at it is that the maintainers are keen to clean up stuff that they perceive as old cruft, and perhaps don't realise quite how ingrained these particular pieces of "cruft" are into the ecosystem.

(On the other hand: the same POSIX link specifies the removal of cpio and, uh, tar. I'm not sure I see that last one flying.)

[1] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/xrat/V4_xcu...