Just wanted to chime-in on the side of this being bonkers.
It’s fine for draft items to appear as choices in a Relationship… but they certainly should not be returned by front-end functions.
The filter solution prevents them from being displayed as choices, but does not address items already set. I know I could use a conditional in the front-end loop, but the situation where I noticed this also relies on a count of the returned items, which would get messed up. I would need to essentially pre-process the results to have it be correct.
I am really curious on the rationale here…
