This counts for me as typical destruction. Destructive types who like to destroy software projects either announce that cleanup which will everything make better "It’s also a strong investment in keeping your code clean and light which improves future development speed" or that destruction is good.

"All references to the deprecated should be removed across all relevant repos" No one should ever know what was there before.

Fork a new major version and don't destroy the old version. Let others maintain that if you don't care anymore.