You guessed right, the reason of this change is to go along with the new “import project” feature, that we call onboarding, that includes the creation of the SQ project + a tutorial to guide new users through the SonarQube configuration of a first project. And it’s not designed for more advanced users.
This new onboarding experience is currently discussed between the SQ dev team and PMs, so I’ll make sure to list this thread and your opinion as insight for the discussion. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, it’s valuable to us.
Now, to help you with the situation you face, one possibility you could use is to do API calls to SQ to set these values for each project, with this endoint. The almSetting key is the one you can retrieve here. You could include this call in your build.
About the new vs old behaviour and the deprecation, no hurries. Our deprecation policy is rather conservative, and the detection of parameters from the scanner will keep working for a while.