I was once appalled when this xep was deprecated with no viable replacement, but that was a long time ago and its ship has sailed:
Since then we moved to formatting based on references, which also provides a nice way for a fallback to clients that don't support them.
Fallback for this one, however, requires including a full alternative message body, which looks very ugly to me, and it gets even more ugly if we want to save/forward this message. Also, I remember endless complaints about html tags in messages from users who communicated with Pidgin, which at the time did put tags right in <body>
So no, I prefer it to stay as it is.
(Message styling as described in XEP-0393 is also not a very good idea that uses input format as a wire format)