I would love a way to go back to the old versions of TestComplete where that object recognition hint stuff wasn't present. I have never seen this be helpful; it's only caused problems for us when...
You can turn off the object recognition hint for mapped objects already. It needs to be done on an object by object basis, but this already exists.
However, while I understand that "it used to work", one of the things that recent versions of TestComplete has done has been to actually improve object recognition... which means that, if the object doesn't exist but something SIMILAR does, it lets you know and tries to proceed. What that hint indicates is that, as you already noted, something changed in the application that you need to account for in your automation by including appropriate "wait" or detection logic.