Off-point. Lambdas are different, in the sense that with such functions you 1) need to think about the closure of the function 2) might need to reconsider what part of memory will be executable (you certainly don't want an executable heap). The change here is in the other direction - you remove a feature that is easily swapped with a builtin, which is implemented in terms of other already existing language features.
Many languages didn't support "arrow functions" AKA lambdas until fairly recently. Seeing how one would go about making large changes to the language is a good lesson to learn. One could argue that we should have known superclasses were going to be supported from the beginning, and I'd agree, hindsight is always 20:20.