Concerning com.atlassian.crowd.embedded.api.* being removed: According to @MalathiVangalapati’s update on Announcing Data Center Platform 7.0 this is an error and will be corrected by Atlassian:
A quick update - there was an error in Confluence 8.7 where the com.atlassian.crowd.embedded.api package got wrongly moved to the deprecated list. We’re addressing this in the next 8.7 bugfix (if there is one), and it’ll be resolved in Confluence 8.8 as well.
I’m glad to read that 