Obviously, as you say, syntax is not what's being deprecated here, but rather the protocol is being deprecated. Even if they didn't intend to make the new proto

Obviously, as you say, syntax is not what's being deprecated here, but rather the protocol is being deprecated. Even if they didn't intend to make the new protocol work with the old syntax out of the box, anyone could have easily implemented something that does do that. (Although you can see in the article that they DO intend to do that already, of course)