Ah, it is similar to Tequipment then. I always found their practice of saying that a product was "discontinued" when in fact they just don't sell them anymore. I hate that.
What is a a distributor that stops stocking something supposed to say other than discontinued?
I suppose it would ideally be nicer to specify "No Longer Stocked" vs "Discontinued by Manufacturer."
Replying to my own post here, of course, but...

What I would really like to see more careful attention payed to is the "superseded by" aspect, which would quite often provide a more obvious path to possible replacements, other variants or substitutes. (Obviously without getting too far down the
substitution rabbit hole like NTE or something, that is...)
Like, yesterday I was looking up the TOP247Y switching controller in my Ryobi P125 charger. The TOP247Y is
obsolete and discontinued so there are none in stock anywhere of course, but when I go back up into the main category and do a complete search, of course I can easily find that the TOP247YN (No Lead, ROHS) is still available just "not recomended for new designs" as there is a newer HX series 257 with better parameters for new designs, but the old series 247Y or beefer 248Y and 249Y are still readily available if I do end up needing to change it out. There is just nothing on the 247Y page that points me to the 247YN page, which would be a convenient direct link to have to prevent the essentially wasteful time spent sleuthing the other "obvious" variant.
It is very correct and actually critical for them to be careful to not intermingle manufacturers' part numbers which are different whether that be ROHS compliance on the lead finish or lead spacing or reel size or whatever. Sometimes these things matter and they are
not always necessarily equivalent but it would sometimes be potentially useful to have an obvious link to similar familial parts in some cases if implemented properly, especially on "manufacturer discontinued" parts.