When hoppers are activated, they still pull items above them even though they shouldn’t do anything.
I tested this out using the configurations shown in the attachments. I put items in the top hopper but the bottom hopper still pulled items from the top hopper, even though it was activated by the redstone torch.
From what I see, this is working as intended. The bottom hopper is in fact locked by the redstone torch but the top hopper is not. This means that the bottom hopper is not pulling items but rather it's the top hopper pushing items into the bottom hopper.