All crafted items seem to be given empty nbt tags which is viewable when looking at the nbt data of the entity when the item is in the player's hand. This causes a few issues , for example, with the vanilla recipe book not working with the items with the empty nbt tags and the items with empty nbt tags not stacking with items with no nbt tags.

Alex's Mobs Version: 1.18.0
Minecraft Version: 1.18.1 and 1.18.2

Versions:

Forge 40.1.0
MC 1.18.2
alexsmobs-1.18.1

This issue was fixed in latest release 1.18.3

Closing this as it has been fixed

I posted too quickly.. #1068 is also this issue

Of note, I do not experience this with 1.17.5, so it's some piece of code that landed since then.