Thanks for all your years of free service.

You can always transition to Paint.Net which is paint but better.  Oh and its free.

Well Krita and GIMP are free and open source so...
Just use that.

Yet it won't stop working surely?

I still use paint shop pro 4.12 shareware version. It gave up counting the days of my evaluation period and has been back to 1 of 30 for a couple years now. copyright 91-96. It's amazing how stable image formats have been.

It won't be removed yet, but it might in further releases when MS sees no more point in including it. Paint.NET is seemingly a good alternative and Krita is a good one for users who need more tools.

I don't know about Krita, but compared to GIMP Paint is easier to use. The reason I still stick with Paint for years is because its simplicity.

Thank God its gone. It sucked!

GIMP, yeah.
I am not a fan.

I do like Krita though.
It is close to the power of Photoshop (give or take), but FOSS.
It also has nice UI/UX. 

Krita is a real painting tool like Paint. Quite powerful, but a bit more complicated than Paint. It's a lot less complicated then GIMP though, but GIMP is also very extensive (and sometimes, frustrating) and meant to do much more then act as a paint tool.