Exactly this. Pillar quartz has no block state that defines its rotation. In the screenshot, all three pillar quartz blocks have the exact same block state data.
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This is a minor issue; it does not show the axis variants in game, but they are there in the blockstate file.
The variants in the blockstate file are arbitrary; they are not necessarily tied to the block state (wool, stones, etc. are their own files). The only reason pillar quartz still works is that the block states aren't being used yet for block data storage – as soon as they are, pillar quartz won't have any rotations.
Actually, looking in mcp code, it seems that there actually are block states for axis (lines_x, lines_y, lines_z), they just all output "lines" as their string.
Confirmed.