Arguing that opponents to removal "can just step up as maintainers" are completely bogus. As mentioned elsewhere, this is more about eroding trust in stdlib as a stable baseline. This is just the kind of thing that will teach people to not trust Python as a stable foundation.
Also. If maintenance of aging modules becomes tiresome, maybe it is a strong hint to keep backwards compatibility in Python proper.
Not at all bogus. If "eroding trust in stdlib as a stable baseline" is an important issue to you, then you can do something about it by helping provide the resources that allows old modules to be kept.
Core language backwards compatibility is a non-issue. Approximately zero percent of maintenance costs go towards that.
Not to mention python has an entirely open proposal process where anyone at any point could have commented and expressed a desire to keep these libraries in the standard library. It seems after this entire process not enough people need them in the standard library.
If your implication here is that the very public backwards compatibility statement, the mailing lists where PEPs are discussed and approved/rejected, and the website python.org are a "locked filing cabinet", it may interest you to learn that this exact PEP was discussed over two threads and nearly 1000 posts on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19948642, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19985802.
That has no bearing at all on the PEP process and is a gross mischaracterization of it. It's clearly documented and open. If you subscribe to any python development mailing list or even the PEP github repo you would have seen this issue. You would have seen links to the discussion which was open for _three years_ and had over 100 comments on it. This was not a decision that was hidden in any way from the python userbase.
Also. If maintenance of aging modules becomes tiresome, maybe it is a strong hint to keep backwards compatibility in Python proper.