> And I'm angry that such a far reaching change was pushed through without
> open discussion beforehand on emacs-devel.

Alan, I understand you're angry.  But this change only affects `M-:`.
Nothing else.  With such a confined impact, it can't qualify for "far
reaching", really.

So please get back on earth and discuss this without that drama which
undermines your arguments.

BTW, your example use of `M-:` also fails in Emacs-26 if you happen to
use it from a buffer where `lexical-binding` was set to t.  Now, this is
rather unlikely to happen in CC-mode buffers, but for code which is
used in Elisp-mode buffers, this current-buffer-dependent behavior was
sometimes surprising as well.

> offered to code it up.  Would you find this a good solution?

I already answered this part.


        Stefan