Further observations about Contacts, Birthdays, and years

The issue of Contacts storing a birthday without a year and seemingly discarding it right away has been posted about a bunch over the years (ex: contacts with birthday - Apple Community, IOS Contacts app can’t add Birthdays to G… - Apple Community)

Anyway, I was fighting with it again this morning and decided to run a quick test and noticed something I haven't seen brought up before: If you're syncing contacts with Gmail, and produce this problem (i.e., add a birthday with no year to a contact and save it) you see it disappear from iOS contacts, but the update actually does propagate to google contacts.

In other words, Contacts app seems to be able to transmit dates without a year just fine, and Google certainly can handle it, but Contacts either refuses to display them, or else when it re-syncs with Google it then can't handle receipt.

I don't know what to make of that sequence of behaviors other than calling it a longstanding bug. If the intent is that a birthday should always have a year, then Contacts should first not accept one missing a year, and second not pass the data upstream to Google.

Interested if anyone else has gotten anywhere with this, or if Apple has acknowledged it at all.