Well yes? People get to decide what to do with their own money, and managers get to decide what to do with the companies' money. That's basically what being a manager means in the first place. They decided spending that money on maintaining a barely used feature was not a very good use of the budget, and that it might be better spent on something that people actually use.

And so would that be a thing we can maybe have an issue with? The entire "handwaving away" bit is the fact that moving a decision another layer up a hierarchy doesn't change who is responsible or how that responsibility manifests, a different problem then "they get to decide on how they spend their money" - we don't have the resources vs we are not going to use them on what you want (which itself is something that is up for say, an influence campaign.)

You can have an issue with that if you want, but I won't be joining you. Put up your own money (or time!) if you want to keep XSLT. Personally I think there are many better ways to spend money than on features nobody uses. Even just giving the money back to shareholders via buybacks or dividends would be better than doing useless work on purpose.

People who want that feature to stay in the browsers should put up some money to fund continued development and maintenance.

The problem with this is that it incentivizes browsers to only implement features if it makes them money and to remove everything else.

Sure, but that's a different argument entirely - we don't have money vs you should be spending the money.