What the parent poster was talking about was not the old hardware IDE interface, but the emulation of the IDE interface within the SATA controller, which exists for compatibility with very old operating systems which understand the old IDE interface but not the newer SATA interface. Since nearly all modern operating systems understand the SATA interface (AHCI) natively (that is, without having to install any extra drivers), that compatibility mode is not very relevant anymore.
IDE is extremely slow, the connectors occupy a lot of precious space, and it hasn’t been used for modern drives for a very, very long time.
If anyone really needs IDE then they should get a USB IDE adapter for their use case.
Faulting motherboard manufacturers for removing ancient connectors is just grasping at straws.