About hunger management: it was annoying, it didn't bring any strategical or interesting gameplay, and if you were unlucky with RNG you'd just die. One or more inventory slots had to be used for food. It would heavily penalise newbies or cautious players that were taking the game a little slower than most. Would force you to cast lower level, less fun, spells so that you'd not starve because you cast one too many level 9 spell.

That doesn't sound fun to me, and don't miss it for one second.

I haven't played in a few years but always felt like crawl's hunger system drove faster games -- where in NetHack I could usually find a way to survive indefinitely and camp out and explore slowly, crawl always felt like the Star Wars garbage compactor pushing me forward.

I think I liked it but I'm not sure it helped me master the gameplay (I sometimes felt rushed even when hunger management wasn't obviously an issue).

Food is far more important in nethack than it ever was in DCSS, it was never a key part of the game in DCSS, just an annoying (and sometimes spoilery) minigame.

They replaced food clock with a straight-up death clock. There's a counter that constantly ticks down; if it reaches zero, you just die.

Just to be clear, the death clock is hidden and is intended to be impossible to trigger if you're not actively cheesing with one of the very few exploits that depend on waiting for a very long time. IIRC to tune the clock, they took the longest non-exploit game on record, and doubled the time that took.