It seems like an effort was made in 21w38a to remove all old worldgen files.
Since some biomes are no longer used in vanilla, these biomes could be removed as well.
In case upgrading old buffet worlds is a concern, the hill biomes at least are functionally identical with their non-hill variants, so the biome ids could be datafixed in that case (desert lakes and regular desert only have the difference that desert lakes generate fossils, mushroom shore and mushroom islands are also identical)
The following biomes are currently unused by worldgen:
badlands_plateau
bamboo_jungle_hills
birch_forest_hills
dark_forest_hills
desert_hills
desert_lakes
(see MC-236852)giant_spruce_taiga_hills
giant_tree_taiga_hills
jungle_hills
modified_badlands_plateau
modified_gravelly_mountains
modified_jungle
modified_jungle_edge
modified_wooded_badlands_plateau
mountain_edge
mushroom_field_shore
shattered_savanna_plateau
snowy_mountains
snowy_taiga_hills
snowy_taiga_mountains
snowy_tundra
swamp_hills
taiga_hills
taiga_mountains
tall_birch_hills
wooded_hills
Steps to Reproduce
Download https://github.com/slicedlime/examples/raw/master/vanilla_worldgen.zip
go to worldgen/biomes and look for definitions of the above biomes
Observed Behavior
They are still there despite being unused and identical to other biome definitions
Expected Behavior
Prune the definitions that are not needed anymore.
legacy biomes wont be removed, they are only removed from generation