I'm the developer of Flamingo. There's understandably a lot of opinions on how exactly this should work, but we believe we made the best decision in removing something that most people rarely use to realize our vision for what a modern instant messaging client should be like. It's an opinionated decision, and we realize that many will not agree with it.
That's unfortunate. I know it's just one example but I was planning on recommending this to my company of several hundred people. But it's essential for people at a company, especially one with a lot of remote workers, to specify when they're away and when they might be back.