The reason why Hibernate requires to eagerly fetch the association is because it needs to force a null association when having a Proxy pointing nowhere.

The reason why I didn't close it is because I want to:

• make it clear in the docs how this behavior is supposed to work
• log a WARN message when the user sets both FetchType.LAZY and @NotFound(action = NotFoundAction.IGNORE) to let the users know that the association will be fetched eagerly.