Just chiming in with a plea to slow down the rate of changes to importlib.metadata - I understand that you want to tidy up the API, but even deprecations cause substantial work downstream.  Would it really be so bad to support the older APIs until they go end-of-life in CPython?

For example, in Hypothesis we care a great deal about compatibility with all supported Python versions (including treating warnings as errors) and try to minimize the hard dependencies.  As a result, our entry-points handling looks like this:
https://github.com/HypothesisWorks/hypothesis/blob/0a90ed6edf56319149956c7321d4110078a5c228/hypothesis-python/src/hypothesis/entry_points.py

Change can be worth the cost, but there *is* a cost and the packaging ecosystem is already painfully complex and fragmented.  Compatibility should be a foundational principle, not an optional extra _if someone presents a compelling use case!_

I'm also seriously concerned that you take GitHub links as an indication of who is affected.  Python is very very widely used, including in environments that don't feed much back into the GitHub-open-source space, and I think it's important to avoid breaking things for low-visibility users too.