In favor of bringing the deforest action back, the filtered deconstruction planner does require one to have robots and robopors/personal roboport. This is not the case, usually, at the start of the game. The action allowed one to fast deforest large areas, from start of the game, without any effort. While the developers may consider trees a nice thing to have, in practice, trees are the no 1 enemy of the players. Always in the way of building.