What happened?

A friend's crystalite elytra broke midair and rather than being unusable but repairable (like regular elytra) simply disappeared (like regular armour.) Initially I thought this could be an issue with the other mods installed, but having tested both the crystalite and armoured elytra on singleplayer without any extra mods/datapacks, both broke like armour not elytra.
The test involved standing on a cactus with elytra equipped until they broke as flight durability was taking too long.
I theorise that it has something to do with the game thinking that they are armour not elytra but I could well be wrong as I have zero modding/coding experience.

BetterEnd

2.1.2

BCLib

2.1.5

Fabric API

0.72.0

Fabric Loader

0.14.12

Minecraft

1.19.2

Relevant log output

N/A

Other Mods

N/A

hm, I think they were actually designed that way...

hm, I think they were actually designed that way...

huh, tbh I thought it might've been intentional for balance or something but I'd asked about it in the discord and got told they should be working like elytra and to submit a bug report

Ah, maybe they did once work just like elytra. :) I'll check when this change was introduced.