This may not have been noticed during development, as the front texture of the head was similar in size with the back texture. Which makes it unnoticeable to players using the vanilla texture, but affects players who uses and/or makes resource packs for this.
I believe this bug emerged after the fix of MCPE-40646 in 1.21.60, which affected how textures are rendered based on the angle they are viewed from.
Yup, still affects 1.21.30. I guess I'll just have to settle with the tall branchy ones for my water lilies, but it's just not the same manðŸ˜
[media]
Still affects 1.21.81