Apparently but those that don’t use a lot of static pages, it’s still seen as old hat in version 2.7. I just noticed it and lost at least an hour, until I finally thought they must have removed it. Little did I realize 2 version ago. Those of us with static page sites don’t change things that often.
That said, main menu widget uses the page ID still.
I agree with Talker in it seems they promote “newness” at any cost. Call plugins that don’t keep up with versions old and say the authors need to get with it. I think if upgrade material were released, feed back taken better, WP can grow.
The option is a legacy version from every major release where bugs and security holes are fixed, but features left alone. This could make WP a much more enterprise application instead of living it’s life in beta.