Raccoon approves these changes. The proposed context seems to be the intuitive one. I think it was just never discovered because the $$ prefix isn't that widely used outside of one-line aliases and popups, except by some of us more advanced folk who would use it creatively for halting events, timers and callbacks for brevity.
But I support breaking backward compatibility when it promotes intuitive function, but it also encourages script updates and new community engagement. Most old and ancient scripts are pretty terrible anyway.