I had the same clever idea once. Deprecation warning, and it would (by the power of a C-Macro) auto-turn off when the relase x was reached, with louder and louder warnings before.
One day I came back from holidays. I had just broken a big go-live where the release number passed x. Date missed, next possibility in a few weeks. The team was pissed.
Yes they COULD have fixed the warnings. But breaking the go live was quite of of proportion for not doing so.
Could the clients have reasonably foreseen when the release x would occur?
Could they not have rolled back?