Comment by AngelOnFira

tl;dr, Discord is forcing bots that are in over 75 servers to make use of slash commands, because Discord will no longer send raw messages starting April 2022. So no more `!pause`, or whatever else you might normally type. And this change isn't easy to implement for Discord.py, and would require full bot rewrites for devs using the library. So along with a lot of other negligence towards bot developers from Discord, Discord.py's single developer has stepped down, and no other core library developers chose to step up.