That is because (afaik) vanilla 0.43 does not have apply undo at all. In other words apply actions that result from properties are simply ignored. In my case the way I am tracking items in undo is I seek selected items which now I realize is not the most robust way of doing so. That said, I did not make this fix to "hide the bug" but rather for the sake of consistency because I believe one needs to be in edit mode to edit, and getting properties for an object, particularly when there are many crammed near each other I believe one needs to select the item to reflect what they've selected, and then do operations that pertain to editing. I believe that allowing to edit items in this way while not in edit mode is essentially a bug from a usability perspective as it erases differentiation between performance (or whatever you will call it) and editing mode. All that said, I need to reconsider how to deal with undo and I have a pretty good idea now what needs to be done (e.g. by passing obj pointer to the undo in addition to the canvas pointer)...