[uranusjr]

I can imagine many existing tools still rely on the commands being directly accessible on PATH, and Apple may be reluctant to break them outright even that’s the goal. They are declared deprecated so people would refrain from using them for new things, and move old things away from them. That’s basically what deprecation means in software, as I understand it. Those commands wouldn’t be called deprecated if Apple breaks them outright.

[teilo]

Right, but in that case I would not expect them to upgrade Python to 3.8.

[uranusjr]

It’s quite likely Apple still wants Python.framework to be available (which is not deprecated) and it’s easier to upgrade the whole thing.