We put off making this change in 1.10 after getting some significant pushback. See this blog post and the subsequent mailing list discussion (which could be turned up with some searching) for more details.

Do you mean this discussion?

It seems to conclude with something like:

I would love to do the PR once a decision is reached.

Perhaps now, almost 1.5 years after the last posts in that discussion and more than 2 years after the release of v1.8 it could be a good time to re-raise the topic. Maybe it's time to do the change it in 1.12?

Yes, that looks like the right discussion. It does look like it petered out without a resolution -- I would suggest re-raising it on the mailing list.

PR #6054 implements a deprecation warning for this change, by the way. The idea would be to warn in 1.12, then implement in 1.13.

Closing as a duplicate of gh-5407.