For what it's worth, this is the difference between private-sector and public-sector development. The public sector would have instead argued for some budget to hire developers to maintain libxslt and issue RFPs for grant money to rewrite it in Rust for memory safety guarantees. The private sector decides that it's just not a profitable use of resources and moves to cancel support.
The question isn't whether or not you use XSLT yourself, it's whether you use a different feature that could be deemed unprofitable and slammed on the chopping block. And therefore a question of whether it wouldn't be better for everyone for this work to be publicly funded instead.
I'm quite unconvinced by this - it seems very easy to come up with all sorts of counterexamples, particularly in terms of public infrastructure, but also all of public services are regularly cut if the organising body doesn't see that service as achieving its goals any more.
It is true that public bodies are less concerned with profitability, which changes how they make decisions around deprecations and removals, but being cost-effective is still important for them, especially when budgets are low and need is high. In situations like that, it's not uncommon for, say, a service to get cut so that funding can be reallocated elsewhere where it's more needed.
I don't think publicly funding this sort of work would necessarily significantly change the equation here. The costs of XSLT are relatively high because of its complexity and the natural security risks that arise from that complexity. Meanwhile, it is very rarely used, and where it is used, there are better alternatives (generally loading a sandboxed library rather than using the built-in tooling).
I’m lost at “the public sector would have argued for some budget”. Xslt and libxslt are used across a no - trivial amount of deployments.
Why would the public sector feel bound to support it as opposed to pivot in the same direction the winds are blowing?
Outside the idiocy of this particular administration in the US, gov is pivoting toward more commercial norms (with compliance/etc for gov cloud and etc compliance).
> Why would the public sector feel bound to support it
The underlying axiom is the Pareto principle - that you get 80% of the benefit from the first 20% of the work, and getting the last 20% of the benefit takes up 80% of the work. The private sector will stop funding after the first 80% of benefit (it's not profitable to chase the last 20%) but the public sector is usually mandated to support everybody so it is indeed required to put in that extra effort.