I don’t think they are going to be phased out, since including lifetime specifiers is a means of documenting intent (they are part of a function’s public interface). Removing them would mean that seemingly irrelevant internal changes to functions would cause mysterious compiler errors elsewhere.
That would be amazing. I was really banging my head on that one.
It's not true. They're required, as they describe programmer intent.
Though presumably there's a chance that more could be elided over time?