Comment by kbhn

In this scenario I would argue that deleting a function abruptly without verifying impacts is significantly worse than gradually adding a delay. Usually when function deprecations occur impacted dev teams are notified on a shared distro of what's coming in future releases. Library maintainers at large companies typically don't have the bandwidth to investigate each project that uses their library to determine if deleting a function would detrimentally impact a production environment. What a deletion does do is block the downstream dev team in this hypothetical from deploying to prod as they investigate why their builds are suddenly failing (or crashing in prod!) and refactor an alternative solution. Do you really want to work in an environment where other devs feel empowered to break your builds and sprints ad hoc?