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I apologise to FC for reporting this as a bug at first. I wrongly assumed that when the block turns from grass to dirt it would count as a block update and that would have triggered the buddy block regardless, but it was a vanilla issue, I was wrong and I stand corrected on the matter.
Grass turning to dirt when a sheep eats it does not trigger the buddy block as of the moment.
This means that buddy triggered wool farming machines have to rely on the signal from the grass growing back before they suck up the wool, which could be done as soon as the sheep gets its wool from eating instead.
Although the machines still function without it, there could be scope to registering grass eating updates that I haven't considered.