I understand the logic, but really this feels like they fixed something that wasn’t broken, and took a step backwards in the process. Instead of being a top level option, you now have to click a couple times to get there. I realize that technically the remove doubles tool has always been a merge vertices tool, but removing double (or multiple) vertices in the same place has always been the core function, and the name of the tool did a good job of representing that.
Probably won’t take me that long to get used to, but could certainly make things confusing for anyone learning the software, as the logic behind the change may not be apparent to these folks.