I think you should not jump to early conclusions. When folks says “phasing out Flakes”, most of the time, we are talking about removing the layering violation that is libflakes and putting Flakes on the same level as any of the alternative: npins, niv, etc. Opening up the pure evaluation knobs and more to any tool and not just that weirdly shape thing called Flakes that is mistaken for 60 features in a trenchcoat.
It doesn’t mean crippling Flakes neither and reducing its functionality, it’s cleaning up and exposing the features required for Flakes but also third party alternatives like npins and niv to thrive.
It doesn’t mean breaking Flakes for end users in the process.
Not only that, but it does mean that the end result may be a space where not only Flakes can improve but other alternatives can raise to the challenge, and we can obtain something better than Flakes, without having to deal with one individual (or entity) dictating what is their vision of Nix without any social collaboration process.
Everyone who has been repeating the narrative that “phasing out Flakes is going to cripple poor users, and it’s insane to even suggest this thing” is just falling prey to a canonical FUD strategy.
I will not comment on the larger topic at hand, but I always find it curious when I read things like “No one came up with a plan for stabilizing Flakes” : no. Many people came up with plans and ideas. At some point, you just have to stop repeating “just remove the experimentalFeatures.require(Xp::Flakes) and be done with it”, you have to work hard to get there. It’s OK that some actors can fool users into believing into how easy it is to stabilize Flakes without putting any effort and blaming other communities for it.
At some point, there’s nothing else than a dead end that awaits those who are unwilling to put efforts to build something bigger than themselves. And don’t get me wrong, even if I’m harsh, I’m grateful for the invention of Nix by their creators and all the nourishment provided by the early nixpkgs community and more.