A Linux system running over JavaScript

The simple reality is that such a piece of hardware hasn't existed for a very long time and I believe the kernel dev's took the opinion that it was causing needless pain to leave it in when no one was using it. Not to mention that there are still all those old kernels that can do it which IMO are much more suited to all that old hardware than the newer kernels. Finally, that the vast majority of people didn't even notice it was gone until someone built a fancy little emulator without FPU support is also indicative that they made the right decision in excising the code.