When was this change made? Is this intentional, or a mistake?

I believe it's always been that way. For sure in the last 5 or 6 iterations. The intent is that I don't check the sorting makes any sense in games that don't use bob's at all and I try to check various combos of bob's, angel's (and select others) that the sorting makes sense. Has it caused issue?

I suppose that makes sense.. only sorting the crafting menu when necessary. I was just wondering, since I was testing a vanilla-ish pack in 0.17, saw ShinyIcons wasn't doing anything, and noticed the new dependency. I guess I haven't played Factorio in at least 7 months. You could always just check for the bobmods variable within your mod, as long as you have the optional dependency to ensure they load first. That's how my mod checks for bobs, but whichever works best for you.

Btw, you know that having changelog.txt in the main folder of your mod makes a changelog tab appear on the mod portal? Checky check here. Also also, did you know thumbnail.png is needed for thumbnails on the mod portal? Just some suggestions :D