There are always people that will dislike a certain querying model and prefer another, but hey, guess what, you can choose whatever you want. Hibernate is a JPA implementation and many users come from the Spring or Java EE ecosystem where the JPA Criteria API is widely used, so for us it is only natural to commit to that API. The legacy Hibernate Criteria API had many issues and was simply not feasibly maintainable anymore. It had its own AST model distinct from the one of HQL and JPA Criteria and rendered directly to SQL. So with Hibernate 6.0 we unified the AST models to SQM, which now implements the JPA Criteria API and HQL compiles to that. This is way easier to maintain for us and all the new features and optimizations we do work for both, HQL and the Criteria API so this is a big win.
I don’t want to sell you anything. You came with a question because you don’t like the JPA Criteria API and I simply gave you alternatives. There is no way to resurrect the legacy Hibernate Criteria API. If you like the query style it offered, you will have to find like minded people and develop a library that mimics that and translates to HQL or SQM directly.