Yes the splitters one is a bug, its fixed in the new version!
I also fixed a related bug with placing offshore pump ghosts outside of your characters build range!
In general any console notification is because of a bug that I need to fix, and the floating text messages are from intended behavior (I can't stop you from placing things, so I have to remove them and tell you it wasn't allowed)
The assembler machine one is intentional, by default they can't be rotated, but later they get recipes that require fluids, and then they can be rotated
I wanted consistency, so in the beginning, since the only allowed placement direction of assemblers with a non-fluid recipe is north, they're only allowed to be placed facing north. Maybe this is sticking too close to the ideal that things can only face the "right" way, but it rubbed me the wrong way that you could later set a fluid recipe to the assemblers and rotate them as you pleased.
A better solution would be if they made assemblers always rotatable, but I'm not sure the devs would do that for the sole purpose of this very silly mod :D
Thanks for the feedback, I hope you're having fun!