Sorry for any confusion here.
Just to follow-up on this; folks are still able to publish static Rmd docs to rpubs. andresrcs and joels refer to steps to take to make this happen. The other thread (Suggestion: bring back the "Publish to Rpubs" option - #4 by jonathan) only refers to a tweak on how publishing to rpubs works (the removal of the "Publish to Rpubs" option in global options - Jonathan has a nice discussion for why that happened in the link above), not a removal of the ability to publish to rpubs.