Why is netstat deprecated?

Found an article on deprecation from 2011. It seems like the whole net-tools package was not maintained for a while and so it was deprecated. In Debian 9 it is not even installed by default. From the project page it seems like there were no updates at least since 2011.

But you can easily install netstat (and e.g. ifconfig) and keep using them. I would probably only use them for listing stuff though.

Installing on Debian 9:

apt-get install net-tools

PS: For more information you might want to see another Q&A about ifconfig deprecation (ifconfig is part of the same package): https://serverfault.com/questions/458628/should-i-quit-using-ifconfig

Why is netstat deprecated? Because it says so in the man page:

NOTE
   This program is obsolete.  Replacement for netstat is ss.   Replacement
   for  netstat -r is ip route.  Replacement for netstat -i is ip -s link.
   Replacement for netstat -g is ip maddr.

Why did the developers deprecate netstat? I don't know.

It's open source, though. If you want to revive it, make it more useful and get it "undeprecated," feel free to do so.