Earlier quoted context omitted.
One person's front-running is another's reference implementation. Although, yes, CSS is getting more complex because everything on the web is. What's the last standard feature to really be taken away after actually existing in the wild for a while? XHTML and Flash (effectively a standard if not in reality)?
XHTML (or the XML syntax for HTML) wasn't removed (see: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/introduction.html#htm... ). You may be thinking of XSLT, which may be removed in future.
Is there still a real-world use case for XHTML/"XML syntax for HTML", or is this just exhibit A that no standard can actually be removed from browsers?
Re: XSLT, back in the everything-is-XML days I desperately wanted to like XSLT, it seemed so useful (I was that annoying co-worker telling everyone it's supposed to be pronounced "exalt"). But it was such a disaster to actually write or read and no real debugging was possible, I had to use a LOT of conditional bgcolor=red to figure anything out. It didn't take very long to come to the conclusion that XPath was the only useful part.