The status of VLAs is officially the exact same as the status of 'uint32_t' and the like, so I think it's fair to say there's a significant difference between something being optional (a la uint32_t) and something being deprecated (a la gets).

But I agree, in practice, the change to VLAs feels more deprecation-like, because they got demoted to optional because everyone more or less recognised that they're a bad idea, I don't imagine GCC will remove it any time soon but I wouldn't be surprised if it got options to disable them and if those options eventually became enabled by default.