It was required before the change. Unless you are meticulously keeping track and filing the specific forms for like-kind exchanges, you aren't doing it properly anyway.
Changing from one currency to another is a taxable event and your capital or income gains would need to be reported. Changing a word here or there doesn't change that.
You would still owe taxes normally based on your capital or income gains, just the trade itself is a taxable event so they must be reported based on that event. Otherwise if you did not make an exchange, you do not need to report capital gains until you do make an exchange.

It makes it more difficult for people speculating because they may have gains one year and losses the next, and that makes filing even more complicated (but this was the case before the law change). People who are new to complicated tax schemes are just getting filled in on how these things actually work.