Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup has been making questionable changes to the game for years, it's actually one of my personal pet peeves how every single patch has done things that are completely unjustifiable, or justified with logic that is contradicted by other elements of the patch. The removal of races like Sludge Elf point to deep problems with the way the current stewards of the game view how it "should" be played. Hell, I found this reddit thread from *2014* that goes into this: https://www.reddit.com/r/dcss/comments/2ombbt/why_are_fun_things_removed_in_each...
The replacement for the food clock is a mechanic that people would hate even *more* than food, because it puts a hard cap on how long you can even exist in the game, which is the issue people actually have with the food clock, not having to micromanage it (which is barely existent in this game, and which, by the time of its removal in DCSS, was also a non-factor).
And this is setting aside that DCSS at least has a way to kill the player other than food - death. ToA has game overs only in certain circumstances, so without a food clock, there would be no reason whatsoever to perform well on encounters that can't trigger a Game Over or push you towards one.
Also, they and you are wrong that hunger didn't add any decision making to the game - in my hundreds to thousands of hours of playing DCSS, considering how to deal with food, whether to eat contaminated or mutagenic food, when to eat permanent food so that I wouldn't be dealing with low hunger on a heavy spell caster or Berserker (who can't Berserk while too hungry) was nearly constant, and even moreso with races like Troll, Vampire, and Spriggan. It was also fun to have the food clock on easy mode playing a Saprovore or Carnivore race, or using an Amulet of the Gourmand in place of a more useful amulet, creating another element of player choice. Food was the most natural way to keep players moving forward, and introducing an arbitrary Kill You mechanic in every branch in the game once too much time has passed was always a bad idea - one they tried multiple iterations of, including spawning OoD monsters. The DCSS stewards exclusively focus on players who have played for millions of hours and thus don't care about the food clock (anymore) while claiming it's about beginner friendliness, but DCSS has never been and never will be beginner friendly compared to more casual roguelikes.