> Curious question to any googlers on here, do engineers ever refuse to push code change which disables a feature like this?

I really doubt there was some decision to arbitrarily disable the feature.

What likely happened is that they decided some legacy system or framework wasn't going to be supported any more. They sent out e-mails and communications months or years ago, hoping partners would do something about it.

Often, engineers are the happiest to abandon the legacy systems. Nobody likes being stuck supporting legacy code on legacy devices, especially when all of your peers are getting promoted for doing cool, fun, new stuff.