I have 2 better ideas;

1. Start charging money for/of deprecated APIs. Just like Oracle did it with Java 8.

- OR -

2. Add a timestamp-based RuntimeException to the very same code-path. If the date is greater than (>) the deprecation date, simply throw RuntimeException. for 100% of the requests, all the time.

Yes, it will page someone, and yes, it will get fixed immediately!