this is a perfectly reasonable course of action if the feedback is "please don't" but the people saying "please don't" aren't people who are actually using it or who can explain why it's necessary. it's a request for feedback, not just a poll.
I'd presume that most of those people are using it in some capacity, it's just that their numbers are seen as too minor to influence the decision.
> explain why it's necessary
No feature is strictly necessary, so that's a pretty high standard.
I think the idea of that is reasonable. If I used XSLT on my tiny, low-traffic blog, I think it's reasonable for browser devs to tell me to update my code. Even if 100 people like me said the same thing, that's still a vanishingly small portion of the web, a rounding error, protesting it.
I'd expect the protests to be disproportionate in number and loudness because the billion webmasters who couldn't care less aren't weighing in on it.
Now, I'm not saying this with a strong opinion on this specific proposal. It doesn't affect me either way. It's more about the general principle that a loud number of small webmasters opposing the move doesn't mean it's not a good idea. Like, people loudly argued about removing <marquee> back in the day, but that happened to be a great idea.
(And if you did want to tell the entire world to update their code, and have any chance of them following through with it, you'd better make sure there's an immediate replacement ready. Log4Shell would probably still be a huge issue today if it couldn't be fixed in place by swapping out jar files.)
I _do_ use XSLT on my tiny, low-traffic blog, and I _don't_ think that it's reasonable for browser devs to tell me to update my code.
Also, it's real easy to manufacture a situation where adoption of a thing is low when the implementation is incomplete and hasn't had significant updates for decades.
Lots of content was lost when Flash was removed as well - much, much more than the amount of content that will be lost if XSLT is removed. And yet the web continued.
They didn't even do the tiniest bit of research, as people in the discussions clearly showed, and there are high impact sites that would be affected by this including Congress and Library of Congress: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44958929
The other reason is that SVG took a very long time to get good, and when it did I wanted to use XSL and SVG together.
Now SVG has got good and they are removing it :(