Yes, we thought quite long about whether to deprecate the v2 runtime. We investigated the current state of CC2DX v2, it's maintenance cycle etc, and it seemed that the CC2DX team simply does not invest any resources into it anymore. We do understand that there are still projects being made with v2, so we didn't take the decision lightly. We are extremely sorry if this causes you issues in the short term.
1) Yes, staying with Spine 3.2 should keep you safe from pain
2) The spine-cocos2dx v2 runtime is build on the spine-c runtime. Thankfully, shearing is fully contained in the spine-c runtime. The branch for spine-cocos2dx v2 is at 3.1.08. The spine-c version on that branch is also at 3.1.08, which does not include shearing. We created the branch before updating spine-c to 3.2.0. However, since the 3.2.0 spine-c update doesn't affect the cocos2d-x/sfml/etc. runtimes, you can take spine-c from this commit to get shearing into your spine-cocos2dx v2 runtime. Just checkout that commit, copy over the spine-c sources and you should have shearing support in spine-cocos2dx v2.
Backporting Spine 3.3.0/3.4.0 changes to this branch is going to be quite a bit harder, as the changes we made also require quite some changes in the engine-specific runtime code. I'm afraid we won't backport any changes from 3.3+ (this includes paths).
Let me know if I can help you with anything, we want to make this as painless as possible for you.
