I am not at all convinced by these workarounds just to get Cairo a bit earlier and avoid walking the proper road to the clean solution (ie properly deprecating what we don't want to or cannot support).
\postscript can be deprecated on other grounds, but we cannot really deprecate \epsfile without an offering an alternative, which means figuring out how to do PNGs via the default PS backend and GS. I'm not really eager to do that, TBH.
I think this is a bad limitation, and adding more dependencies into the mix doesn't make it more appealing.
As I said, I don't see obvious use cases for \epsfile where you really need vector graphics. LilyPond provides markup commands for that.
With Cairo, I am not aware of benefits for our users, it is more motivated by internal maintenance considerations - please correct me if I'm wrong.
- SVG rendering is *way* faster. - It also embeds fonts, so the generated SVG files are device-independent. - PDF rendering is a little faster. - It does not use a subprocess, which makes it easier to sandbox it (cf. the problem with LilyPond on GitHub actions that was discussed some time ago on this list). (OK, this is defeated by the "workaround" as you noticed.) - It makes it easier for developers to add certain features that would be harder to support in the current backends, like PNG, which benefit users in the end.
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