Yeah i hope too that this is not intentional, since in my oppinion total views is kind of a unmeasurable metric (that doesn’t really tell us much about the channel). In general i hope that the new api provides more informations about channels in the future (maybe some stats regarding average viewers, country, …), at the moment the new api seems to be lacking in that regarding.
My solution for now was to use the old api to get these kind of informations.