Many developers forget or don't realize ManyToOne in JPA is eager resulting in many N table joins where none of them are really useful. I loved the old hibernate that defaulted everything to lazy. Can we have a property to override the JPA way of doing it?

Something like
<property name="hibernate.manytoone.default" value="eager" /> for JPA

A great article on why...
https://vladmihalcea.com/2014/12/15/eager-fetching-is-a-code-smell/