You can lead a horse to water...

No one here works for Microsoft. We cannot tell you the why of changes. This is a user-to-user support forum. The people responding on this forum are experienced users trying to tell you how to use the Word that is, not the one that was, nor the one that ought to be. That it was not a problem for you in the past indicates, to me at least, that you were lucky.

You can set keyboard shortcuts for language-specific character styles. Ctrl+Spacebar turns a character style off.* If you want to use macros for this instead of styles you can do that. You are making your document more complex under the hood than it needs to be.

You can make suggestions for Microsoft using the feedback mechanism in Word or UserVoice Word for Windows.


* Ctrl+Spacebar does more than that; it reverts the text to the formatting of the underlying paragraph style.