I do not have a strong opinion either way; I myself sort of just use Dir[]
rather than Pathname (I just love Dir['*.rb'] and things like that), so I would
not need pathname anyway. But I can understand the argument given - 10 years is
also quite a long time ago, and the linked issue actually then refers to a commit
from matz in 2004, so 16 years ago. That's a long time.
I would recommend to focus primarily on #to_path rather than a #to_str, if only
for the purpose of the suggestion here; and perhaps suggest it for an upcoming
developer meeting, if this is wanted by Daniel, such as for
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/16661.