Debian pauses its /usr merge — again

The announcement concerns an activity that is internal to Debian (changing the canonical paths of non-/usr files in dpkg's database of package contents, so that dpkg considers the official path of cat to be /usr/bin/cat instead of /bin/cat, and so on), which some Debian developers wanted to push ahead with immediately after the bookworm release.

That activity has been temporarily suspended, but we expect it to become desirable in future, after some technical issues that block it have been resolved; so by the definition you cited, this is indeed a moratorium.

This does not affect whether /usr is merged on end-user systems: it only affects the state of the dpkg database and the contents of new .deb files. So it is misleading to summarize this as the /usr merge having been paused.