I wanted to use something to validate user inputs to my API, but getting Pydantic right and then keeping it updated has been too much unnecessary work, which makes me wonder if you have also faced this problem and what your solution is?
Deprecations are healthy, otherwise you get technical debt which harms development.
It is not the same, but typeguard has runtime typechecks with the @typechecked function annotation. Mypy checks help as well.
I’d strongly recommend looking into msgspec. It is a much faster alternative and is largely “correct” in its implementation. It uses all of the python native type annotations without many hacks. Really it is much much faster and can actually be used for performance sensitive python workloads that need strong typing.
Pydantic won't change again significantly, so it won't be any effort to keep it up-to-date.
There were good reasons to make all the changes made in the V1->V2 upgrade, I think those are pretty clear.
I think Pydantic is popular because of it's extremely flexible/powerful while also being intuitive to get started with.