It's important for code to be clean and free of old cruft, even if that means old code has to change. Readibility is one of the most important aspects of maintainable code. Arguably more important than testing, IMHO. This is another reason open source solutions so consistently win over corporate ones, the open source world understands this.

Are there changes I disagree with? Of course. But I'd rather live in a world that moves forward and occasionally breaks me, than one where I have perfect compatibility but am stuck on code lacking the new innovations my competitors benefit from.

The whole idea behind deprecating things is to give people time to make the changes before they become breaking.

I went and looked: exists? was marked as deprecated in 2013 and removed in 2022. That's enormously generous, my previous comparison with the disttools debacle in python was inaccurate. You had a decade!