I put "throwing the cruft away" in the same sentence EXPLICITLY to address that I am not just talking about refactoring.
Learn to read before throwing dictionary definitions at people
Providing method now-provided by standard libs is by definition unnecessary cruft. Nobody wants that in their codebase. They warned people for 2 years.
But apparently basic competence is too hard requirement in software ecosystems.
> Providing method now-provided by standard libs is by definition unnecessary cruft. Nobody wants that in their codebase.
I don't think your sweeping claims here are justified. Importing the function from the standard library into the same namespace in your library where the function you previously implemented was is not "cruft". It's helping your users by not making a breaking change when you don't actually need to--no actual functionality changed.
> apparently basic competence is too hard requirement in software ecosystems
Your snark here is even less justified IMO than your sweeping claims above.
> giving users no added value to compensate for the time and effort required to deal with the change
... the users of free software. That didn't bother to find&replace one method in their plugin code.