The bug
Buckets which get modified in a furnace lose their NBT data. Lava buckets can be used as fuel and turn into empty buckets and empty buckets can be used to collect the water when drying a sponge.
How to reproduce
Place a furnace and put a smeltable item in it
Put a named lava bucket as fuel in it
/give @p minecraft:lava_bucket{display:{Name:"{\"text\":\"Named Lava Bucket\"}"}}
Hover over the created empty bucket
→ ❌ You will see that it has no name anymore
Code analysis
Based on 1.11.2 decompiled using MCP 9.35 rc1
The methods net.minecraft.tileentity.TileEntityFurnace.update()
(lava bucket → empty bucket) and net.minecraft.tileentity.TileEntityFurnace.smeltItem()
(empty bucket → water bucket) create a new item stack.
Can confirm for MC 1.12.1.