A manager reads that a feature the team relies on is deprecated with an earliest removal date about a year out, and asks whether the team's client will break on that date.

The principle — A minimum lifetime is a floor on how long you have, not a countdown to a break.

Why the key is correct — A Deprecated feature remains part of the specification but is scheduled for removal: new implementations SHOULD NOT adopt it, and existing implementations SHOULD migrate before the feature's earliest removal. On what the date means, the registry is explicit — the earliest removal marks when a feature becomes eligible for removal; the actual removal is a Core Maintainer decision taken during release preparation and may happen later. And as a matter of record, no features have been removed under this policy yet.

Why the others are wrong — The date is eligibility rather than execution, revisions do not sweep deprecated features out automatically, and nothing is removed without a decision.

Remember this — Earliest removal is the earliest, not the date.

Sources — MCP first-party documentation.