When placing burner inserters onto a ghost that has been taken from an inserter that used the "Long inserters 1" tech, while in the current save that technology is not yet researched, the inserter still allows for range +1 movement.

Ugh, never mind, just saw another post for this, it just wasn't apparent from the title. It's still weird though, do ghosts carry some sort of metadata, that gets "coppied" into the placed entity? If yes, it's weird, cause then the property for the offset doesn't get copied and works as intended.

Yes, they carry the pickup and drop location offsets in the blueprint IF they have been changed from default. (but not if they haven't, meaning a base game long-handed-inserter in a blueprint, if changed to only have standard reach in data, would change to be standard reach, hence why my inserter overhaul in logistics does not do that)

So if you use bobinserters (this mod) to change the hand locations, those are stored in the blueprint and applied even if this mod isn't installed. (well, it will not if the tags to allow mods to change positions are set to not allow it, which is the default for base game inserters)

TLDR; configurations of edited inserters are stored in the blueprint, and the effects you see is how the game engine decides to handle the situation.