I feel like they are doing random deprecations with replacements that don't work as well as the original. As in, leaving the deprecated thing unmaintained but present in the install would be a better outcome. I wonder why they are wasting so much time doing this when they appear to have a working system. I'm not even talking about big items like 32-bit support or opengl but completely random libraries that work fine.
This is a completely standard failure mode of large organizations. You have a product that works perfectly fine the way it is, but you also have an entire team of people whose job it is to do something with that product. The existing product has already been optimized for years and most changes are moves away from optimal rather than towards it, but they can't get paid to do nothing, so they change things that were better the way they were.
This is related to the thing where what customers want most is bug fixes for existing bugs but what marketing wants most is new features to sell to new customers and marketing tends to win, which causes the number of bugs to go up rather than down over time.
It's also a problem of company culture and career ladders. Fixing bugs and making a more stable product isn't going to line you up for a promotion - but some fancy new feature no one asked for will.
As just another random instance, I updated my MacOS about a year ago and now I can only change the last 3 parts of my MAC address, the remainder appear to be fixed.
I know my hardware has the ability to change my entire MAC address - I don't get why they are doing this.
The leading octets in MAC addresses are often called "vendor prefixes", and are assigned to various hardware vendors. Apple probably wants to ensure that all their devices show up in ARP scans and MAC lookups as Apple devices.
To make it harder to spoof specific devices, perhaps. Commercial end-user OS vendors generally don't think your computer being able to do something implies you should have control over that capability.
