Endermite whether spawned from an ender pearl or from a spawn egg do not make endermen aggressive.
I booted the game without optifine which didn't fix the issue.
I used spawn eggs and enderpearls to spawn the endermites, I also used spawn eggs and naturally spawn endermen, neither worked to fix the issue.
The only fix I have found is to use the snapshots, where this issue doesn't seem to exist.
I noticed the problem when building an enderman farm in my survival world then jumped into a creative world to test the problem more there.
Duplicate of MC-53518, which has already been fixed during the development of 1.17 Caves & Cliffs, what means, it'll be fixed with the release of update 1.17.