It'll break a lot of valid functionality that relies on it, and the only case I can see presented as to why is for situations when servers choose to offer scp when they should have chosen to offer sftp.
Complaining that some people hand out shell access and this creates a "problem" that they gave people access to shell commands verges on ridiculous.
Having servers offer scp instead of ssh is not the only problem.
What about this part of the article:
Finally, while the danger is remote, it is worth noting that a local file name containing `backticks` (a file named `touch you-lose`, for example) will be handled the same way on the other end; if a user can be convinced to perform a recursive copy of a directory tree containing a file with a malicious name, bad things can happen.
You can deprecate something while still letting people add it back into their PPA manually. If you absolutely need an deprecated tool, no one's going to stop you: it's linux. Heck, just com,pile it from source and be on your merry unsupporteed way.
The scp protocol is literally deprecated: what do you not agree with? The idea (and already being worked on) is to change the scp command's underlying code so that it behaves exactly the same as before, all your scripts will keep working just fine, it just won't use the now dead scp protocol under the hood and will instead use the universally supported sftp protocol.
It'll break a lot of valid functionality that relies on it, and the only case I can see presented as to why is for situations when servers choose to offer scp when they should have chosen to offer sftp.
Complaining that some people hand out shell access and this creates a "problem" that they gave people access to shell commands verges on ridiculous.