Not sure I would call that a solution as now you cannot use that feature. I would also point out you said "covertly" - as if they were being deceptive or deceitful in some sort of devious, sneaky way. Not so. The problem was, people would see that huge file and freak out, delete it, then complain they lost their data. So MS made it hidden by default. Do you have show Hidden items enabled?
You say workstation, can we assume this is a PC and not a laptop? Hibernation was really designed for laptops, so you can close the lid, go to work, open the lid and resume where you left off - without running down the battery during your commute.
Hibernation is still used in PCs, but in "Hybrid" mode since being plugged in to the wall, there is no worry of running down a battery while you go to lunch. The idea is your current session status will be saved in RAM during sleep HOWEVER should you have a power outage during that time, your session will be saved and can be restored from the saved hibernation file on disk (assuming power is back). Turning off hibernation may result in lost data in that scenario.
Typically the size of the file is about the same as the amount of RAM installed. But this can vary and may drop considerably if just sitting at the desktop with no open programs or files. This may account for the disk space appearing to come and go.
I also note should your disk fill up with your saved files, Windows is supposed to yield the space used by hibernation. So again, MS is not intentionally meaning to be maliciously sneaky.
Of course I am now assuming hibernation was working properly and there is no corruption on the disk or in the Windows feature. If me, I would probably run Disk Cleanup or CCleaner, then run Error Checking or chkdsk /r from an elevated command prompt, then enable hibernation again to see what happens - unless I was desperately low on free disk space and in that case, I would be looking to uninstalling unused programs, moving files to another disk, or buying more disk space.
