I’m not an expert in such matters but I can’t see how it gets us any closer to deprecating String (other than by generating community momentum towards improving text types in general).
This. I don’t think deprecating String is going to happen anytime in the next 5 years. There is simply too much code to contend with and upgrade at this point, without decent alternatives. The best we can do is make reasonable alternatives available and urge people to choose them over String until a critical mass is reached. Only then can we even think about it. However, I’m unsold on the notion as it is: String is not good for some programs, but it’s fine for others!. String is not performant, per se, and we should not offer it as a default string representation along with Text variants (which only leads to a proliferation of mostly-the-same-but-subtly-different datatypes), but it’s not wrong to write String in many cases.
I think the attitude that we should deprecate string is a function of frustration with it being the default, rather than one made on technical grounds. In that sense, I can commiserate, and I hope we get there, but let’s not go too far.