Agreed. I usually hate on Apple, and its terribly ancient utilities and gratuitous incompatibility with modern Linux utilities, motivated by hatred of the GPL license.
But in this case, I think what it's doing is… basically fine? "Tar should faithfully reproduce the semantics of the source filesystem" is a perfectly reasonable starting point.
Ideally there would be a documented way to turn off the Apple-specific metadata with Apple's own tar, though.
From tar(1):