Buggy hidden/invisible/non-existent appearances

Sometimes I find that newly created live text objects or other objects have appearances on them that I can't see in the Appearance tab but I know that some form of extra appearance exists (unless it's a bug) because going to the top menu and trying to do Object > Expand... won't work. This is because the option is greyed out and instead Object > Expand Appearance is available. When I click this I can see nothing changes in the Appearance tab, and yet Object > Expand... becomes available again.

The existence of these hidden appearances actually causes problems with scripts I write in regards to dealing with appearances in various ways.

Repoducing this problem is very easy as all you need to do is create some default text with no appearance, then with the text selected use the eyedropper tool to click on the text. You will notice in the Layers panel that the object's selection circle(if that's what it is called?) becomes filled with grey indicating it has an appearance even though the Appearance panel shows nothing has changed. This appearance has materialized out of nowhere.

This has to be a bug right?