Yeah... The design philosophy seems to be "remove features but don't replace them with anything. Leave it up to the DM and/or player create mechanics & base worldbuilding, or just use your imagination and pretend!"
It's ironic in that the rules' very point is that "using imagination and pretending" was something that they were meant to formalize to an extent so players have a clue about what their characters can and can't do instead of it being straight up LARPing.
Which, with proficiency bonus introduced in 5e, was already on its way there, honestly, because they've made every character (who doesn't have any abilities < 8) have a basic idea about every skill there is even if they had no background in the related area... It's not like things like lockpicking or interpreting magic gestures require dedicated training or anything, which 3e represented by you having to commit at least one point to some skills in order to use them in the first place, and skills that weren't your class' forte required two points to increase and their max value was at half your nominal (level + 3).
