Fixes to utilities.general and function rename

Explanation of changes

Cleans up a bit the general module and renames one of the functions to a more appropriate name. The renaming has been done leaving an alias for the old function with a DeprecationWarning.

Motivation of changes

The fact that the function can be used for different python objects was spotted be someone in quantify-scheduler and currently there is a TODO comment for this change.

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Merge checklist

See also merge request guidelines

• Merge request has been reviewed and approved by a project maintainer.
• Merge request contains a clear description of the proposed changes and the issue it addresses.
• Merge request made onto appropriate branch (develop for most MRs).
• New code is fully tested.
• New code is documented and docstrings use numpydoc format.
• CHANGELOG.rst and AUTHORS.rst have been updated (when applicable).
• CI pipelines pass
  • black code-formatting passes (gitlab-ci),
  • test suite passes (gitlab-ci),
  • no degradation in code-coverage (codacy),
  • no (serious) new pylint code quality issues introduced (codacy),
  • documentation builds successfully (CI and readthedocs),
  • windows tests pass (manually triggered by maintainers before merging).

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