Reasoning why this is part of the core and not a separate addon:
The impact of this function is extremely lightweight when (almost) no
aliases are defined so someone who isn't using this should not have a
worse experience.
Additionally including it in the core (similarly to the discounts,
taxes and restrictions) promotes it's availability while not massively
increasing the maintainability.
As for the OddItem removal:
That plugin hasn't been developed for over 7 years and such unique
plugin support should really be added via separate addon using the
events system which, with the new ItemStringQueryEvent, now actually
supports doing that from an external plugin.
If someone really managed to run their own private fork of OddItem for
all those years then they should be able to also provide such a simple
addon.
