Which allows any compiler that never implemented C99 to be certified as compliant on later standards (C11, C17, C23), thus yielding the same outcome in practice.
The status of VLAs is officially the exact same as the status of 'uint32_t' and the like, so I think it's fair to say there's a significant difference between something being optional (a la uint32_t) and something being deprecated (a la gets).
But I agree, in practice, the change to VLAs feels more deprecation-like, because they got demoted to optional because everyone more or less recognised that they're a bad idea, I don't imagine GCC will remove it any time soon but I wouldn't be surprised if it got options to disable them and if those options eventually became enabled by default.
