I've used this mod for so long I forgot that this wasn't vanilla behavior.
However, having long inserters revert back to regular inserters is a pain to deal with in SA when building space platforms, as you have to send another rocket full of long inserters if you move your long inserters too much when designing a platform. Would be great to have the same upgrade option, but have the long inserters drop as the long variants. rather than the base inserter, if only in remote view or in space if that's possible.

I'm not sure if that would be possible, without control.lua shenanigans. I think you'd either have to disable the setting entirely, or have an assembler dedicated to making long inserters (without making too many). The only thing the setting changes is making it so that the minable result is the base inserter instead of itself, but that occurs during startup and affects it everywhere (no way to change that part).

It might be possible to do using control.lua to check every time an object is mined, if it happens to be on a space platform, and change what the minable result is, and hope that it works the way I expect, but...

I'd take an option to keep the recipe change and have them always drop as longs.

Added new setting in v5.0.3, long inserter drops long inserter (separate from the costless long inserter setting). When disabled, reverts to the previous behavior of dropping the base form inserter instead