[CentOS] Reason for removing php-mcrypt from CentOS 6/7

Does anybody know why php-mcrypt was removed from the extras repo when CentOS 6 came out?
I've been going through the archives and I saw plenty of people complain about it but no explanation for the reason.

I know it's available in EPEL but I want to avoid third party repos if at all possible.
If for some reason it became no longer advisable to use php-mcrypt in production then knowing that reason would be helpful.