A possible reason why someone running a website should care about keeping stuff up is to avoid link rot, to me it feels like part of bejng a good Internet citizen is to ensure that a change to your website doesn't break other websites or links where possible and reasonable. (if people want stuff removed, then that's fine though).

However, it might be that it's too expensive to even just keep stuff up, so fair enough, but if that is the case, I feel more warning would have helped a bit here.