First and foremost, take all of the content in this article with a grain of salt, as it's still early Alpha phase.
Well, seems like this is the hottest World of Warcraft topic nowadays and it feels like I have to write something too, as I expect the questions will keep rising on the subject..
If you have been living under a rock and have no idea what I'm talking about so far - the upcoming World of Warcraft Midnight expansion is taking a rough stance on AddOns and limiting a huge amount of previously available API. Things like WeakAuras, damage meters, nameplate addons are pretty much dead.
What does this mean for ToxiUI?
Seeing as how ToxiUI is heavily dependant on ElvUI, we can't really say anything for certain. As of today, ElvUI has not released any stance on this topic.
If I were to guess though, there's a high possibility there will be no ElvUI in the future. Again, only speculations. Worst case scenario it becomes a skinning plugin, that just applies that dark texture we all love.
What about Classic clients?
So far Blizzard hasn't mentioned anything about these changes coming to the classic clients. Although, they have been slowly rolling out the modern Retail API to Classic API. I would not be surprised at all if in a year or two, the same happens to Classic, too.
I don't play Classic (either version), never really have. I also can not answer if ToxiUI will continue to exist for the classic clients, as again it heavily depends on what becomes of ElvUI. If nothing major changes for classic and business is as usual, then sure, I will keep maintaining it to a degree.
Personal opinion
Honestly, I am looking at this whole debacle quite optimistically. When Dragonflight first released, I was a little bit excited about the new UI changes, even if later I realized it's very barebones. Some things though, like the cast bar, minimap, new microbar buttons truly felt nice. Still, I was too attached to ElvUI + ToxiUI so I never used them. Now though, seems like I'll finally be able to :)
From what I've seen so far, the Cooldown Manager is pretty nice and we will be able to achieve a similar "WeakAuras-like" setup. Also, it will be nice to not worry about addon updates, or performance losses (unless Blizzard fucks it up LMAO).
So is ToxiUI dead?
Short answer: no.
Long answer, I don't know. ToxiUI started as a way for me to express some little part of my artistic side. I shared it with a couple people, they liked it, more people liked it and now we have around 15 000 (give or take judging on downloads per patch) active users.
To me, ToxiUI is no longer just an ElvUI plugin. To me, it's a community - an ideology if you can call it that. I believe that no matter what happens to addons, if we're only left with edit mode and that's it, I will still try and provide inspiration to the UI community.
Now this is definitely not a promise of any kind, but I kind of imagine a new ToxiUI addon - one that just applies small cosmetic touches to the UI. A little gradient here and there, some nice icons over there, etc. Only time can tell what will happen in the future, and again, I truly am kind of excited about the future.
Letter to you
As I just mentioned, ToxiUI is now a community. I have met some truly amazing people during these oh-my-god-it's-almost-5-years! I just double checked when did I start and shit, it's really been 5 years (minus a couple weeks). You can read the history here if you're interested :P
None of this would have been possible without you, my dear community and some of you I might even say friends (you know who you are).
There's a lot of doom and gloom in the community at the moment regarding this topic and it's a little bit sad. I wanna stay optimistic and make the best out of a bad situation.
Thank you all for your support, love you, and talk soon. This is not the end.