The name tf.placeholder is deprecated

Yes, that's correct. The tf.placeholder API has been deprecated since TensorFlow 2.0 and has been replaced by the tf.TensorSpec API. Instead of using tf.placeholder, you can create a tf.TensorSpec object to specify the shape and data type of a placeholder tensor and then use the tf.TensorSpec object in your code to create placeholder tensors. Here's an example:

import tensorflow as tf

# Define a TensorSpec object for a placeholder tensor
input_spec = tf.TensorSpec(shape=[None, 32, 32, 3], dtype=tf.float32)

# Create a placeholder tensor using the TensorSpec object
input_tensor = tf.placeholder(input_spec)

# Use the placeholder tensor in your code
output = tf.layers.conv2d(inputs=input_tensor, filters=64, kernel_size=3, padding='same')

Note that the tf.placeholder API is still available in TensorFlow 2.x for backward compatibility, but it's recommended to use the tf.TensorSpec API instead.