I don't have a strong opinion here, but I'd expect that the Debian-specific sticky rules will be removed at some point in favour of the upstream mechanism and we'll have to migrate at some point anyway. But that's just a gut feeling, I'll reach out to the Debian systemd maintainers to see what their plans are.

The old Debian-specific sticky rules are in fact only supported for the stretch release cycle, the NEWS file for udev explicity calls that existing systems need to be migrated:

If you have ifupdown, firewall, or other configuration that relies on the old names, you need to update
these by Debian 10/Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, and then remove etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules.

After all the patches for T163196, as well as the interface::alias work (Gerrit topic:T163196, topic:interface-alias etc.), the only hardcoded "eth0"s remaining across the tree are P5452 (categorized). There are a few others for eth1/eth2/eth3, but are basically in the same categories (lvs + labstore).

Change 357609 had a related patch set uploaded (by Faidon Liambotis; owner: Faidon Liambotis):
[operations/puppet@production] Switch stretch to predictable network interface names

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/357609

Last call for objections, there is a change staged and its merge is imminent :)

Change 357609 merged by Faidon Liambotis:
[operations/puppet@production] Switch stretch to predictable network interface names

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/357609

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2017-06-08T16:33:02Z] <godog> delete net.ifnames for ms-be2001 and ms-be2013 - T158429

I've finished converting ms-be stretch systems to predictable network interfaces, no problems observed so far. For reference the commands:

sed -i 's/net.ifnames=0//g' /etc/default/grub
update-grub
sed -i 's/eth0/eno1/g' /etc/network/interfaces
reboot

The new eth0 is eno1 for 1gbit interface (dell/hp) and eno49 for 10gbit cards (on hp)