I'm not lamenting it being removed.. but will say that it was probably a huge multiple more popular and widely used than XSLT is in the browser.
Dropping XSLT is about something different. It's not bad an in an obvious way. It's things like code complexity vs applicability. It's definitely not as clear of an argument to me, and I haven't touched XSLT in the past 20 years of web development, so I am not sure about the trade-offs.