Status Quo
These homegrown utils tend to duplicate other open source libraries. They also have issues in the way they are implemented and sometimes even duplicate their own functionality.
Proposal
The redundant ones should be marked as deprecated. The maintenance team and others will replace them with open source libraries on a case-by-case basis. Some kernel utils will be updated to use the open source libraries by the maintenance team. The maintenance team will also communicate with the dev list to discourage the usage of deprecated kernel utils.