Is PayPal Hosted Checkout Pages integration considered legacy?

We are looking to create an integration with PayPal for processing payments on a website. Previously, we had known about PayPal's Hosted Checkout Pages integration, and wanted to explore that. But after researching PayPal's developer documentation, here's our understanding of the state of this integration option:

In order to use Hosted Checkout Pages, we must use Secure Tokens.
In order to retrieve and use Secure Tokens, we must use PayPal's NVP (name-value pair) API. We are not 100% sure about this, but the only places in the documentation where we found references to Secure Tokens stated we should use NVP.
The NVP/SOAP API section in the documentation is tagged as legacy.

This seems to suggest that if we use the Hosted Checkout Pages integration option, we would be developing against a legacy API, which we want to avoid if possible. Is this understanding correct, or are we missing something? Is there a way to support a similar workflow as Hosted Checkout Pages with another integration option? Mainly, we want to avoid handling customer credit card data for PCI compliance reasons.

Solution

Yes, that's a legacy Payflow thing -- great 10 years ago, not recommended now.

The current options are the black 'Debit or Credit Card' button of a standard PayPal Checkout integration -- or beginning with such an integration and as an add on to it implementing the Advanced Credit and Debit card hosted fields, which allow you to style a credit card form with your own site's CSS while keeping the sensitive fields hosted by PayPal.

But if you want rough direct visual analogs of legacy Payflow offerings vs current PayPal:

Payflow Hosted Checkout Pages :: standard PayPal Checkout buttons already include this (black button expands an iframe)
Payflow Transparent Redirect :: Advanced Credit and Debit Cards

Separately, Payflow was a complete gateway service. If your business use case _needs_ that, Braintree Payments is the new gateway.