Not really surprise but I'm just hearing about this now and apparently MS was plannning on deprecating by now. I'm also wondering who they surveyed. I manage a small disconnected domain and use wsus and the driver updates feature for everything. I barely have enough time to keep wsus running much less try to figure out config manager, which seems to be built only for enterprises with 10k machines or more and needs a large team to manage it.
Sure it may be possible to package your own drivers, but that's yet another task to learn and keep track of. Pulling drivers from the repo and bulk declining stuff I don't need may be inefficient in cpu cycles and bandwidth, but at least it didn't take me from other pressing matters. I have bandwidth limits too!