Why are Phantom References not cleared as they are enqueued?

Question

We can see that "phantom reachable" is as unreachable as "unreachable": §

An object is phantom reachable if it is neither st

Answer 1

This was changed in JDK 9. Now phantom references are cleared as soft and weak references do. And the corresponding paragraph was removed from the Javadoc.

Unlike soft and weak references, phantom references are not automatically cleared by the garbage collector as they are enqueued. An object that is reachable via phantom references will remain so until all such references are cleared or themselves become unreachable.