Has Camera Raw changed the colour handling in recent updates?

Hello all,

I've been using Photoshop and Camera Raw for around a year.  I'm just doing a basic workflow that a friend taught me, as I'm a bit of a novice.  I take bird photos with OM Systems OM-1 and 300mm f4 PRO.

My starting point is to process the .ORF (RAW) file in Camera Raw, and click the Auto button.  I found this generally made a great improvement, but quite often I had to correct the Exposure.  Apart from this I would sometimes adjust Shadows & Highlights, adjust Whites and Blacks, then do Denoise and Sharpening.  At this point a .DNG file was created, and I clicked Open to make further adjustments in Photoshop (usually just cropping and sometimes to remove a distracting feature).  Generally I was very pleased with the results.

However, this changed around August this year, with the Camera Raw update to 17.4 (I think).  There were changes to the dialogue, and now it saves the edits in a .acr file, and it doesn't automatically create a .DNG.

This all seemed fine (especially saving on disk space with no need for the .DNG file) but I started noticing that I wasn't happy with the colours in the photos, especially the background.  Specifically anything green in the background (e.g. leaves or grass) became more vivid, distracting from the subject (e.g. a perched bird).  I then try changing some of the sliders but really struggle to get a result that I like.  In this case I would revert to the original and just make changes to the Exposure and then Denoise and Sharpen.  I tend to use the Camera Natural profile, though I've also tried Adobe Color (which is a slight improvement).

Any ideas or thoughts please?  Has anyone else had a similar experience?