Pantone Spot Color Libraries to be removed from Adobe Illustrator?

I wonder who decided this would be a good idea. Obviously I don't know any of the licensing details between Adobe and X-Rite (the owner of Pantone) to include electronic swatches of the various Pantone color books within Adobe Illustrator. Has Adobe always had to pay some sort of fee to include the color books? The Pantone swatch books have been available in Adobe Illustrator going back for many versions. Electronic versions of the same spot and process color books have been bundled with several rival applications as well.

I always assumed the Pantone electronic color swatch libraries were included in applications like Adobe Illustrator as a sort of "loss leader" to get users to buy the physical color swatch books for accurate, real-world color referencing. If the swatch libraries are removed from Illustrator (and other Adobe applications) that will just end up giving Pantone far less visibility as a spot color standard. That could result in considerably less product sales for X-Rite.

My workplace already gets quite a lot of client-provided artwork that is RGB-based. And some of it is very problematic for converting into CMYK. The Pantone colors at least worked as a sort of bridge between the two color models. Plus, customers could look at a physical swatch book to get a close but not exact idea of what would be printed. Or they could compare the Pantone chips to color chips from a paint company library or roll vinyl colors for cut vinyl graphics. I don't think very many people outside of an actual graphics production environment are willing to spend the money it costs to buy those color books (and do so every year or so to keep colors up to date). The prices for physical swatch books are starting to get a little ridiculous. If X-Rite wants to pay-wall the Pantone color swatches behind a $60 per year subscription (on top of blowing $200 or more for a physical swatch book) they're going to wind up with considerably fewer people using the colors.

I guess I'm going to have to start figuring out ways how to mimic spot colors like that in  L*a*b* values as a work-around. I don't know. I'm already dealing with enough headaches as it is involving home-brewed client files and what not. This Pantone situation is going to be yet another thing that turns into a time-suck.