AEM 6.5 is dying a slow but inevitable death, AEM as a Cloud Service will be around for many years to come but is not where Adobe is putting emphasis. Adobe sees the future of AEM as Edge Delivery Services (see aem.live) and Universal Editor (experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/e… which actually shows that Adobe is trying to reach parity with AEM Classic). They believe that customizations should migrate to Adobe Developer App Builder.

I’ll say from an integrators perspective, the new world Adobe is pushing toward is a lot better in many respects, but AEM 6.5 and AEMaaCS deployments are inherently more fully baked and support a lot of enterprise use-cases that the new wave of technologies won’t for quite some time.

I suspect, like with Adobe Commerce SaaS, that Adobe will eventually try and position the new technologies as the future of the platform and encourage everyone to adopt it wholesale, but like with AC SaaS, they truth is that it won’t be ready for five years for some use-cases, and enterprises who want/need tighter control will never switch, so the older offerings will probably never fully go away.