If a player stacks a lot of boats around a villager it is possible to trap a vex in a boat. The vex will sit inside the boat not doing anything until they despawn.
This can be used to create "raid farms" which have a single villager surrounded by boats at a pillager outpost location. All pillagers will pathfind to the villager and they can be killed via lava / falling etc. The same may hold true for minecarts however I have not tested this theory. If vex's did not get stuck in boats they could still kill such villagers in these farms and they would cease to work. If no mobs could get put into boats (that were not in water) it would probably fix a lot of mob farming issues.
Linked issues
is duplicated by
relates to
Attachments
Comments

what the..... he just want to break smart designed farms
Eh.. vex’s can fly through literally every block in the game. It makes zero sense for them to be stuck in a boat. If they can fly through oak planks it’s completely stupid for them to magically get stuck in a oak boat.
right. so by that logic random mobs should be capable of choosing if they want to enter boats. Sooo maybe a 50/50 chance they enter / get in it? Because it would be impossible to say all non real life things would enter a boat 100% of the time.
dont fix this
Please close this as "won't fix". Raid farms are an enjoyable part of the game.
That it's used in farming XP doesn't have any effect on the decission mojang is going to make if they are going to fix this or not; as Shane said, neither IRL nor MC logic explain this; they can go through everything, but not a boat? that makes no sense no matter what perspective you look at it.
Don't remove the ability to trap vexes. I'm trying to create a zoo of every mob in the game (with the exception of the ender dragon as I don't know how to trap her or transport her to the overworld). I just found out that you can trap vexes with boats too.
P.s. As for wandering traders, I removed the ability for them to despawn with a datapack, so they are a simple option for capturing in my survival world. The wither, I can just use bedrock to trap one for my zoo.
People better not try to break another farm or zoos / mob museums 🙂
Better don't fix this. Please stop.
Also if you want to put vexes in zoo in survival I believe evoker-spawned vexes die after few seconds regardless of name tag / boat.

Affects 1.16-rc1, also please, don't fix this, it's very useful when making raid farms
Note that trapping vexes in boats isn't strictly necessary for raid farms to function. You can prevent the vexes from spawning by (1) making sure the evokers never make eye contact with a player or villager and (2) killing them in one hit so they can't retaliate against a player by spawning vexes. Here is a YouTube video with a design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gcWlWTuTj8
Can confirm that this is an issue in 20w51a.
Can confirm in 21w06a.
Can confirm in 1.16.5 and 21w08b. Video attached.
Can confirm in 1.18.2.

In 22w45a
I would say that this is Works as Intended. Boat mechanics are not a glitch, and this is just boat mechanics working as intended. Mojang programmed the boats to be this way, and that's the way they are. Now whether this should be something that happens is a matter of debate, but this is not a bug.

The thing is that Vex are meant to go through things, official confirmation for WAI or not would be best
Affects 1.20
Most likely intended, all mobs that have a small enough hitbox can enter boats.