Most sites say callee as a property of Function.prototype.arguments is deprecated. But some sites go further and say the whole of Function.prototype.arguments is deprecated E.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20130313045745/http://aptana.com/reference/api/Arguments.html . Why only mention callee if the whole routine is dead in the water? I only just discovered arguments and it seems incredibly useful E.g: http://hungred.com/how-to/secret-arguments-array-javascript/
Function.prototype.arguments is deprecated, but it's only deprecated in favor of the vanilla arguments object that's available within a function. (e.g. using x = arguments[i]; instead of x = theFunc.arguments[i];)
That's now the preferred (and as you say, extremely useful) method for accessing the ordinal arguments received.