People on this thread have created checklists in the style that they wanted them to behave ... what you're describing would be Evernote removing a useful feature that many people have been using ... very poor practice ...
Your suggested just accept it solution doesn't answer the use case I posted and judging by the complaints from others it wouldn't answer their use cases either.
If, as you suggest, the Evernote team don't listen to their users and this useful feature is permanently deprecated/limited ... the safest way forward would be for us all to switch to a more flexible alternative ... there are plenty about
I have been very happy with Evernote for many years but maybe it's time to take a more serious look at Microsoft OneNote as I already have it free with Office ... available on all of the same platforms and a quick glance shows it supports exactly the type of checklist I want in a more user configurable manner 🙂