Those aren't the same thing. A deprecation is a change in contract. A change in contract has to be worked out with consuming teams. In fact that's the whole poi

Those aren't the same thing. A deprecation is a change in contract. A change in contract has to be worked out with consuming teams. In fact that's the whole point of deprecation: to kick off the migration process. Still need the rest of the process. In contrast, this is about internals, stuff that was never part of a contract but that people use anyway. It comes up a lot in JS because the language doesn't enforce privacy. And it's super painful to not be able to change stuff you never made part of a contract--it freezes your whole codebase. Is changing internals other people have come to depend on a good idea? Depends on a ton of context, but you should strive for a technical culture that allows this.