I wanted to provide some background on why we've made this change. We were experiencing some reliability issues with the future publishing functionality across the platform in 4.7.7, and we had to revert some recent fixes for bugs and go back to a known state. During that testing, we repeatedly ran into issues with publishing new items with dates in the past, which is why we made the decision to disable the ability to add new items to the past. In older versions, setting a publish date was something specific to Pages, then we expanded it to cover more areas.
If you have any specific use cases for this feature, please let us know. Your input will help us determine the best way to move forward and ensure that our platform meets the needs of all our users. I did see how @Dreadknux uses this functionality to backdate press releases and articles for legacy consoles.