Rotating the mesh components doesn't necessarily have the same effect as rotating the normal map or the UV islands. If it did then tangent space normal maps wouldn't work on anything other than static objects because in-game meshes are often required to deform and rotate. The assumption that the UV islands and normal map…
I agree, it doesn't make sense. I cannot recreate this either, it's working as expected for me. Did you rotate in edit mode or object mode and applied transformations? Which version of Blender are you using? I guess there are no modifiers on the object?! Would be best if you could share an example file.
@FrankPolygon this is gold, thank you! I've thought about it more since the first two answers, and indeed I came at the conclusion that it didn't make sense. If normals couldn't be rotated then they would be world space normals, which are an entirely different thing, and it would mean that any object with a normal map…