It was one of the tools that allowed me to maintain healthy credit card usage habits. In my idle time when messing around on my phone I’d gotten into the habit of just transferring money from my checking account to my credit card, often in excess of my actual balance, so as to cover “pending” purchases.
Not only will my bank no longer let me do that, just to twist the knife a bit, they will let me make multiple payments totaling the pending total due so long as no individual payment exceeds my actual balance.
So it’s not that they can no longer handle negative balances on the card, it’s just that they’ve half-ass made the interface disallow it.
Debit cards offer less security, are less convenient at most places, and might cause an overdraft in the event of a bank error.
Bank error and debit charge putting you in overdraft? You now have two problems to solve.
Bank error and credit charge with a future pay off date? You have one problem and more time to solve it.
Guess they’d better learn how to add numbers, then.