Well, players who speak highly of it probably wouldn't play the modern crawl :)

Old Crawl had a lot of systems around food. You had races that were mostly or entirely vegetarian, which made them significantly harder to play in that respect. Then there were the kobolds, which could eat almost anything, the ghouls which didn't even mind rotten chunks - but they had other problems to balance it a bit. You could opt out of the entire hunger system by playing mummies - those went all the way back to Linley Henzell, and he had the philosophy that if you wanted a bit tedious play style, you could have it (mummies were really hard to play, though!). The Hive was a dungeon side branch with a lot of bees and honeycombs, a big breakpoint on the food clock if you weren't one of the carnivorous/saprovorous races, but nasty if you didn't have poison resistance. I think they removed it entirely in modern crawl? They might as well, without food its whole purpose is gone.

Of course the game works fine without food. ToME has no food, and it's fine. But it says something about how much of the original game they ditched.