Nah, 喰 is entirely unrelated; it's one of the few characters Japan invented (most are imported and sometimes simplified from Traditional Chinese).
On the other hand, you might recognize 吃 as the 喫 from 喫茶店 (café).
The Chinese simplification was overall a good thing. A lot of the simplifications are from Japanese, even. Like, compare the Traditional 體 with the Simplified 体 (body) - the latter is from Japanese.
The Japanese simplifications were pretty good, but a lot of the Communist ones are aesthetically ruinous. 车东气门 have none of the symmetry that 車東氣門 have. 气 doesn't even have its center of mass over its base of support, although at least in this case it is six strokes less. The Japanese simplifications seem to have kept the artistic flavor.
Those simplifications appear to have been designed purely for reduction of stroke count (that is, making it faster to write by hand), not for simplification in the sense of making it more simple, logical, and consistent.
(As a matter of fact, that "simplification" introduced further inconsistencies, in that certain radicals were written differently when part of a character, while the traditional writing maintained it.
Example: 金 gold is the left part of money, which you can see in the traditional 錢, but not in the simplified 钱. Similarly 言 in traditional 說 vs simplified 说.)
Yeah, and the radicals sure got uglified. I calmed down a bit when I found that apparently a lot of the simplifications where just officializing shortcuts people were already taking. Kind of like spelling "with" as "w/", I'm guessing.
Prewett - true. But then, why make it "simple" but ugly for _printing_? It's absurd... just keep the complex form in books and reading printed text, and tolerate what people are writing out by hand in cursive. That's distinct anyway. It's as if we'd "simplify" the "-ing" at the end of words to some wiggle with a dot and a loop in printed matter.
To add some anecdata from native speakers (not me), I've noticed many simplifications like 机車 in "Traditional" Taiwanese handwriting, but I've never seen 机车.
Characters are mostly displayed on screen nowadays, and most fonts are indeed symmetrical. I don't find Simplified Chinese handwriting ugly at all, but it looks odd on-screen.
On the other hand, you might recognize 吃 as the 喫 from 喫茶店 (café).
The Chinese simplification was overall a good thing. A lot of the simplifications are from Japanese, even. Like, compare the Traditional 體 with the Simplified 体 (body) - the latter is from Japanese.