[orf]

I think every developer has written the famous words: “at some point we will remove this”. The accuracy of that statement often seems to be pretty dubious.

[evanelias]

Doesn't seem dubious to me. I would expect it to be removed (or at least have the utf8 alias changed to point to utf8mb4) in the next major release. utf8mb3 was deprecated in the most recent release series (MySQL 8). For feature deprecation notices, MySQL consistently follows a pattern of deprecate in major release N --> remove/change in major release N+1.

[beatgammit]

Exactly. I don't believe something unless there's a time schedule, and even then I'm doubtful if it's further than "the next release or two".