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The opposing opinion would be that changes of vital OS features has happened to all the operating systems. Users expect a new version of software to run on newer operating systems. The web has never deprecated anything close to vital. We're stuck, seemingly, with everything ever conceived.

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I would argue that most users expect that their software continues to work on new operating system versions without being forced to upgrade (which is easy for free software, but less so if the upgrade costs money and the users are entirely happy with the feature set of their current version).

PS: also, looking at Windows specifically, new operating system API layers don't necessarily mean that they are an improvement over the older APIs.

Firefox has deprecated support for FTP, RSS feeds. Web extensions using manifest version 2 are being deprecated in Chrome, removing substantial capabilities. Whether these features are "close to vital" is debatable but certainly some functionality that used to be ubiquitous are being removed.

That’s not what I was thinking. I was thinking more of deprecating some elements of JavaScript that prevent speed gains.

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