I know some of the maintainers have been pushing for deprecating the plugin for some time. They argue that you should manually execute all docker commands using `sh` or similar instead.

Personally I disagree, I run almost all jobs in docker containers and rewriting everything to handle this manually will make all the Jenkinsfiles very messy.

Really???

So now we're expected to rewrite all of our pipelines to manually manage docker containers?

That is incredibly disappointing to hear.

Enough so that I would likely discuss with our organization whether we continue to use Jenkins in the first place.

The governance for deprecation suggests there are three steps to deprecating the plugin. Only the first appears to have been accomplished so far, adding the "deprecated" topic to the GitHub repository.

This pull request updates the documentation with the notice and the recommended usage, the second and third steps.

So do I understand correctly: the Jenkins project simply plans to pull the rug out on this plugin?

No coordination of changes to the official handbook documentation, no explanation provided to users, etc.?

We are also relying heavily on the plug-in. Re-writing all pipelines would be a real pain.

Depreciation of this puts me in a horrible situation. The easy and clean integration of Docker with CI is the biggest reason I use Jenkins. 

https://github.com/jenkinsci/docker-workflow-plugin/pull/289