I've been able to confirm this in Koha 24.05, I haven't looked at other versions. I've spun up KTD with ES7 and the About page is reporting "Version: | Nodes: | Status: not running" for Elasticsearch, even though the SearchEngine syspref is set correctly, and searching and indexing is working.
Is this the same problem as in bug 37509 (https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=37509)?
Ah I think you're right that it is. I didn't catch that it hadn't yet been backported - I read it as it had been backported and the bug still existed. Thanks! *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 37509 ***