Looks like it was removed not explicitly, but due to the path it was installed being locked down now. I don't know what was responsible for them being installed before, whether it was there on the OS by default, or just installed by a previous Xcode version, but now when I look across the filesystem for 'freetype', I only find these, besides those bundled with specific apps:
/Users/Shared/Relocated Items/Security/usr/X11/bin/freetype-config
/Users/Shared/Relocated Items/Security/usr/X11/lib/libfreetype.6.dylib
Many other libs and such were moved as well. I don't know if there's a simple process to get these libs back somehow, I have recently installed an Xcode update that doesn't seem to have done anything for me. Gimp, VLC, PyCharm, and DbVisualizer all seem to bundle the dylib inside the app, wondering if it would be smarter to just do that ourselves now. Would then also be nice if we included that in the prebuilt libs I think, so devs wouldn't need to install it from Brew either.