Debian's which hunt

Reading through the discussion archives, it seems that the reason for the intended removal wasn't technical or adherence to some standard. It was social. The (one of?) maintainer of the debianutils seriously got a lot of request, often in hurtful language, about perceived downsides of the which packaged in debianutils. See here:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2021/10/msg00001.html

Basically he simply didn't want to have to deal with that shit anymore. Which (no pun intended) I emphatically agree with.