I see now the original motivation as the unfortunate situation that mxnet authors did not understand that np.ascontiguousarray returned an array of at least one dimension and perhaps used that one API to assume that NumPy did not support 0-d arrays --- which NumPy does indeed support.
Certainly that situation would motivate a documentation change to help steer other future users from making the same incorrect assumption, but deprecation is a separate question entirely. I do not agree at all with the trend to remove functions from NumPy API prior to a dedicated NumPy 2.0 effort. This breaks the idea of semantic versioning for NumPy.
These functions do, in fact, have a use and were very much intended to produce one-dimensional arrays --- in order to be used prior to calling C or Fortran code that expected at least a 1-d array. A lot of the SciPy wrapping code needed this behavior. It is a misinterpretation to assume this is buggy or unintended.
Improving the documentation to warn about the behavior for 0-d arrays could indeed be useful.
-Travis