"The EC2-Classic platform was introduced in the original release of Amazon EC2. If you created your AWS account after 2013-12-04, it does not support EC2-Classic."
Yeah but this is the customer-friendly way to deprecate - let existing users keep using the old method indefinitely, new users have to use the new way.
That was 4 years after VPC was launched. So yes, while they do deprecate stuff on the rarest of occasions, they still give you much, much more time than GCP ever did.
Also, EC2-Classic is still available if you reach out to your TAM with a really good reason.