Yes, seriously. I would still think it's totally unjustifiable as a 'helpful' change, but at least it'd be causing problems like "hey, this install failed, how do I fix it?" rather than "where's all my stuff?"

That, and I'm just a bit shocked that "the folder should be empty, so delete it" didn't just naturally make people think "obviously I should check if that's true first". Even if it's not a total fix, the failure to add that is it's own layer of screwup.

Even that could potentially be a breaking change, like if the folder was expected to be there by some application.

That can be solved by updating the broken applications. Deleted data is never going to come back unless you have a backup.

Not all applications get updates.

"Save/Read X to/from the user documents folder" should be an OS-level function (on Windows, where you expect a desktop user to have a documents folder).

Every time a program calls a deprecated API, the developer who signed the code should get an e-mail.

The API wasn't deprecated when the code was written.