Well, I'm not torn up about anything! That's because "deprecated" in computer jargon means that that feature (or program) is going to be removed in a future version.

I think the intent is that using <br> in place of <p> is discouraged so I do not see any inconsistency in those two documents since both suggest using <p> tags for paragraphs.

Nice try but you will have to do better than that!! :-)