88 isn’t really the same thing, although, like you said, some people perfectly innocently use it, which is why it’s a dog whistle. 88 became a thing when Nazis had to hide they were Nazis. The swastika is not that obviously.
Why they dropped the symbol is likely because people were using it to say the Finnish government were Nazis, like th comment above implied. It’s an easy target for people like Russian apologists to say “we’re denazifying Finland” or whatever, while they do plenty of actual fascist shit.
Symbols are as useful as they’re interpreted. If they’re interpreted wrong then you should probably change them. It doesn’t mean we should allow people like the person above to imply anyone using them is a fascist. They should be countered and shown how stupid their arguments are. I have no idea why you’re defending them.
It’s not the ideal solution, but it is approachable and understandable for technically averse users. I think it’s good to have, but I only used it for one package, and that was as a separate Steam install that included an old version of glibc that was used in a particular game’s (Squad) anti-cheat until it updated it.
It’s good for a stable platform, but each package needs it’s own set of everything, which can be good (like the Steam example above having its own version of glibc instead of using the shared version on my system), it’s a lot of bloat. I’m not using it unless I require it for some reason, but again it’s nice to have around.