A typical hibernate application based on JPA requires hibernate-entitymanager

That was true prior to 5.2, yes. That is no longer the case, obviously.

I'm inclined to reject this. So far the discussion is not compelling to me from a Hibernate perspective. I can see that it causes you some difficulty in Spring Boot, though. To me you are simply hamstrung by your use of Maven here. Gradle would have let you handle this on your own.

You are lucky though Chris Cranford and Vlad Mihalcea convinced me to consider adding the empty hibernate-entitymanager artifact for 5.2. I'll consider it.