juice function is superseded in the recipes package. I used it a lot. Using bake requires being explicit about new_data argument. I wonder if there is a reason not to set new_data = NULL default for bake function.
In my mind, bake() primary function is to apply changes to new data. Similarly to what predict() does. Setting new_data = NULL is a shorthand in bake() in case you have retain = TRUE. Making bake() work more like juice() is IMO not a good choice. I note that since new_data is the second argument you can do rec |> bake(NULL) which is a little shorter.
Secondly, you are fine using juice(). since it is superseded it isn't going away.