It was not a breaking change at the time (more than a year ago - or even two).
Back then it was addressed by a .pacnew file - which you neglected to merge.
It kept working until now, when the community repo was finally shut down.
.pacnew files are a thing you are expected to tend to when using this distribution
It’s how gradual changes over time are addressed.
… hard to impossible to automate for every use case, as you (as the admin) could have made changes to these files yourself for a number of reasons
Simply replacing the “new” with the “old” will rarely work and would destroy the adjustments that you may have made over time.
as said above:
realistic or not (in your view) - it is how the distribution is set up to work
And it is not a secret.