Thanks!
Chip might be EOL, but it's clones are still widely made.
The main reason I want to use it, that I have some compact 8x8 led dot matrix modules (2mm dot pitch) and I want to make 32x8 array from them. If I use MAX7219, the IC itself is larger than the dot matrix module, so PCB tracing will be harder, and also it will occupy more space, so I decided to seek an alternative.