It was one of the tools that allowed me to maintain healthy credit card usage habits. In my idle time when messing around on my phone I’d gotten into the habit of just transferring money from my checking account to my credit card, often in excess of my actual balance, so as to cover “pending” purchases.
Not only will my bank no longer let me do that, just to twist the knife a bit, they will let me make multiple payments totaling the pending total due so long as no individual payment exceeds my actual balance.
So it’s not that they can no longer handle negative balances on the card, it’s just that they’ve half-ass made the interface disallow it.
It really depends on your bank or credit card issuer. Some places will accrue interest from the day of purchase until the day of repayment. It might be pennies for me and you, but I’m sure they make bank on their collective customer base. And deliberately making it difficult to pay off debt that causes additional charges should be illegal.
I’ve never encountered a bank or card issuer like that in the US. Can you provide any examples?
Anyway, in that case, the solution would be to not use that credit card or bank.