People are using it for reflected DDoS attacks. This has resulted in DNS providers scoping ANY to the point of breaking it. So even without removing it, it was horribly broken and returned inconsistent results.

In essence all this change does is remove the fiction of ANY, with or without RFC8482 ANY wasn't reliable enough for real usage.

Given how bulky ANY is, and the fact that we're changing the standard anyway, would not just restricting ANY to TCP queries "fix" the DDoS issue? The attempted TCP connection would not be formed (the victim would RST it).

(I agree with other issues pointed out by the article, and there are other reasons why, as a RR type, I would still axe ANY. But the functionality of being able to query all RRs on a server is often useful for debugging, though I think there are other practical ways to work around that. (Issue a query for many common RR types.))

The problem is that no one could tell reliably what ANY even was. Chalk it up to English being ambiguous in every way imaginable.

Or is it "any way" imaginable?

Agreed!