It appears that as part of the transition from IBM Worklight 6.1 and 6.2, changes were made to the JSONStore API. Specifically, it looks as if the load() method (along with others) were deprecated.
It appears that the replacement for this approach is to instead use the change() API that's part of JSONStoreInstance to refresh data from an adapter call (i.e. syncing it from the backend), and to mark it as "clean" along the way. I make this inference from the most recent versions of the JSONStore tutorial for MobileFirst Platform 6.3.
However, this change to the JSONStore isn't discussed in the "what's new in 6.2" section of the Knowledge Center, as far as I can spot.
Can someone confirm this is indeed the intended change? Is there any more information on what changing with JSONStore support between 6.1 and 6.2 publicly available?
Working with JSONStore and external data in v6.2 is documented here. There are APIs for transactions (i.e. startTransaction, commitTransaction, rollbackTransaction). There are security utilities here. There's an advancedFind API that uses QueryPart objects and other find API improvements (i.e. filter, sort). There's also a native JSONStore API for Android and iOS with examples here. The structure of the documentation changed and new sections got added (e.g. general terminology) while some old sections got updated. There's a way to enable the collection of analytics information (e.g. file size, operation time) from JSONStore (Android & iOS, hybrid & native) to the Operational Analytics console, that's documented here. There are also hybrid JSONStore APIs for Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8.
The changes are all intentional.