I think this is a really bad idea for us to allow removal of deprecated code for micro releases.

It contradicts the widely accepted industry practice where micro/patch releases are expected to be non-breaking.

I would instead be in favor of this policy:

• major release (x.y.z -> (x+1).0.0) - deprecation removal is allowed without restriction.
• minor release (x.y.z -> x.(y+1).0) - deprecation removal is allowed subject to the 6+ micro release condition.
• micro release (x.y.z -> x.y.(z+1)) - deprecation removal is not allowed.

This way users who are updating micro releases have some assurance of backward compatibility across micro releases. And they're not encouraged to just pin their applications to a specific micro release to avoid potential breaking changes.