No more Apps in iTunes?

I've just discovered that I am no longer able to manage apps in iTunes as of v12.7. This means that if i have to restore I must redownload all my apps again. If I buy a new phone I have to redownload all my apps again. I have 20GB of apps. I'm on a 1.5Mbps DSL connection. Downloading 20GB of apps is going to take a long time-28 hours, best case and my internet is NEVER best case. So it could take a couple DAYS to restore my apps tying up all my bandwidth (if you can call it that) the whole time. Going to McDonald's for free WiFi isn't much of a help since they don't have very fast internet either and I doubt they will let me hang out for hours and hours and hours.

In addition to that issue, I will now have to download apps four times, once on each iDevice I own instead of being able to download once into iTunes and then sync on each device.

This was a stupid and thoughtless decision by Apple and ignores the fact that most of us don't have high speed internet. I have a couple apps that are over a gigabyte and Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint are 400+MB EACH.

This wouldn't be so bad if the apps were at least backed up to my hard drive during a backup. That would solve the restore problem though it wouldn't help the setting up a new device problem.

Please, Apple, put App management back into iTunes or at the very least make it so that the apps are part of the backup since the most likely usage would be to restore an existing device or transfer to a new device.