After a lot back and forth - as Spring 5 + Hibernate 6.6 work differently than Spring 6 and Hibernate 6 - I finally was able to set up a small proof-of-concept application. And unfortunately I have to say that the EntityGraph works there as expected, no need for fetch-joins. I can see in the SQL statements created that it correctly inserts a LEFT JOIN and also that I don't get a proxy object for Person.picture. So I assume it is simply a bug in that latest Hibernate 5 version - which probably also will never get fixed. 😩