According to the documentation, the Hibernate criteria API has been deprecated in favor of the JPA Criteria API. Sadly the Hibernate implementation of the JPA criteria API doesn't support EntityMode.MAP for metadata-driven, classless entities, although the old deprecated API still does.

I created a branch (https://github.com/koehn/hibernate-orm) and JIRA (HHH-7714) with a fix for this. So far it works just fine in my testing. Please take a look and let me know what you think.