No worries. It’s better to have it solved like this rather then have a bug like this!

Just made face to face tests 29 / 28. It turned out they do the same. It seems Trim is the mode I was talking about, not Media or Crop

My apologies.

Yes, the ticket can be closed

Testing.
29.2 Beta:
Bounding Box ignores any bounds, but the objects’.
Trim uses artboard bounds, no bleed.
Art behaves like Bounding Box intersected with Trim.
Media uses Bleed bounds, doesn’t ignore empty areas — same as Crop.

InDesign 2025: same
CS2: same

It makes he behavior the same as before, consistent with other apps, and covers all the reasonable variants.
Do you think it covers this up, or do you observe something else? Should I close the report?

upd:
temporary rolled back to v 28.7.3 due to another bug (https://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/601447-illustrator-desktop-bugs/suggestions/49111304-font-changes-from-the-current-one-to-the-previousl)
As expected: when set to "Media"placed artwork includes selected artboard (including empty areas) only.

Here we go.
See, Art respects objects only. The page has actually larger height than on screenshot

Uhm... Now I'm really confused.

I use placement really a lot in my workflow. And there is a little chance that I haven't noticed this before. And i clearly remember it has always been following:
- Media (or Crop, not sure as for now) for the entire page w/o bleeds.
- Bleed: for page + bleed
- Bounding box if I need all objects and don't care about page.
I can't even remember I ever used Art option.

I can open some old files, but there is no way to find out the placement option used for linked files.

Is it only me?

I see. This seems like a common confusion with Crop.
You should pick the Art or the Trim option here.

I believe it never changed in 29.1... when I compare it with much older Ai releases and InDesign — they all behave the same.
Sorry for the false confirmation! Why do you think it’s changed?

All these options are based on how Acrobat treats them.
Crop defines the boundary for the contents of a page when it’s displayed or printed — and this includes bleeds.
Art defines the meaningful content of the page, including white space (usually the same as the dimensions of the page).
Trim defines the finished dimensions of the page after trimming.
Bleed defines the path for paper trimming and folding.
Media defines the physical paper size of the original, including page marks.

Egor,
sure. see screenshots

Actually, you get the same result no matter what is set in 'Crop to'

Andrii, at the same time... can you please demonstrate how it looks for you? What do you expect and what you actually get?

Confirm. Even in the Place PDF object the dotted framed drawn when picking Crop is misplaced!