Crafter cannot be powered above through an air block like dispensers/droppers/pistons

Can confirm.

How is this a valid report? Literally only droppers, dispensers and pistons do this, not any other redstone-powered block. Mojang has also been clear they want feature parity, and don't intent to port quasi-connectivity (MC-108), so this is also requesting further parity breaking.

How is this not considered a feature request?

In the official Minecraft Feedback Discord server, the following is listed under #already-considered:

Java and Bedrock will not have the exact same the same redstone systems. This would require redoing redstone system completely on one platform or the other. The two systems are functionally different and are going to stay that way.

From Mojang's official statement, it is clear that parity does not apply to redstone components, especially Java-specific systems such as quasi-connectivity.

It is reasonable to expect that a dropper-like component is powered like a dropper, so this is a valid bug report, even if we don't currently know whether the absence of quasi-connectivity is intentional.

from redstone perspective itmakes a lot of sense for crafters to support quasi connectivity as it behaves like a dropper, also it would allow for much more interesting to design autocrafter mechanisms as quasi connectivity allows for more ways to wire redstone contraptions (it is even more important for crafters as one of ther most effective ways to design those is 1wt (one wide tileable) which leaves only 4 faces of a crafter block to work with, so crafter redstone contraptions would benefit a lot from being able to power crafter fromm 1 block above as it leaves more block faces to input items into crafter block)

In the blog post for snapshot 23w46a the following was said:

— we aim to make the crafter more consistent with other blocks that drop or eject items

In conjunction with what Tis_awesomeness mentioned it is clear that quasi-connectivity as described in MC-108 is part of Javas-redstone system. And the crafter is part of Javas-redstone system.

However the resolution as "Works As Intended" would indicate otherwise. It would mean that every single redstone component, that can be activated (droppers, dispensers and pistons) can also be qc powered, except for the crafter. This would make the crafter inconsistent in that regard, something that is clearly not mojangs intention.