It looks like it was done to not delay the 4.0 release. Since they follow semvar, that means it won't get the axe until 5.0 [1]. Pretty wild considering that 3.0 was released 10 years ago.

But maybe they will scope this one better: they were talking about getting 4.0 released in 2020 back in 2019!

[1]: https://github.com/jquery/jquery/pull/5077 [2]: https://github.com/jquery/jquery/issues/4299