Not a feature. It’s a cast iron, 100%, guaranteed screw up. Gaijin used to have AI bombers that worked perfectly well every time. Any bugs had been worked out (eg, on Sicily one side would always miss the base, while the other side’s bombers always hit and destroyed it). They screwed it up and months/years later bombers still haven’t reverted to the previous logic. Bad enough to introduce a broken feature, but to break a feature that was working well and then do nothing about it… just crass incompetence. Their most inept change ever (so far). This is why they should mostly ‘do nothing’ to EC.
Edit: ok, I can’t totally rule out the possibility it is actually a feature and someone at Gaijin really thinks milling around in the middle of the map is ‘more realistic’ than bombing a target and turning for home.