I hope that the model of “we will prevent all updates to Connect descriptors starting in three months’ time” that was recently proposed for Bitbucket Connect will not be applied to the rest of the Connect ecosystem. (Well, actually, not even for Bitbucket either.)
I understand that Atlassian wants to find ways to convince developers to move to Forge. If Connect is going to remain supported and functional, the whole thing should work, not “partially supported with handicapped features to coax people to move”. Being able to push app updates is a critical feature and not just a nicety.
Even just proposing a theoretical requirement to force vendors to adopt Forge from Connect (and change nothing else) would be a tough sell for me at present. I still see significant permissions, upgrade and versioning issues related to using the Forge manifest, not to mention the reliability factor and the additional points of failure.
If Atlassian does eventually force vendors to move to a Forge manifest, or even drop support for Connect updates, I would hope that this is only enforced after the above problems are addressed and vendors have a lot of lead time.
(More carrot, less stick?)