You’re not wrong @rlkoshak 
I guessed it because I was facing the same issues with the home assistant auto discovery and saw the same behavior.
It’s an issue that’s known and I believe is already being worked on. I’m looking for the thread to link here, I’ll be right back.
Edit:
Found it:
With this bug created as a result:
https://github.com/openhab/openhab-addons/issues/18598
This was a tough one, because I moved out of the esphome binding (because of unrelated issues) and went to mqtt hoping to have more control only to get smacked in the face with this issue. @ccutrer was super helpful in explaining what was happening so I briefly switched to a manually created thing instead and did not have issues. (I’ve since gone back to esphome and the issues I had there are also sorted now thankfully.)
Because the bug is set to closed I believe it may already be implemented in one of the latest releases.