I don't believe that VLAs are actually deprecated as such, but have been moved to an "optional" feature for implementation in C11. There's a feature macro to check, __STDC_NO_VLA__, but I don't think the feature is actually disappearing from the standard any time soon.

I wonder what is a good use for VLAs btw. I used it for a string padding function to create the padding with a simple loop before a call to strjoin. Is that a bad idea or a legitimate use case?

Don't use VLAs for anything that actually requires an allocation. However, VLAs are quite useful when you have a buffer and want to access it like an array.