They work differently, the “old” chests use skeletal meshes and animations (more performance heavy) and monitor people accessing it, while the new stuff uses simple static meshes and timelines to just rotate the lid from one edge.
From what I remember the issue is that this new method would require a trigger when you stop interacting and the engine doesn’t send that when using the ESC key cuz it just natively closes the UI, while if you use the interaction key, that one will correctly do this.
It’s still a bug ofc and would be nice if they implemented a solution for it, it’s been like this for years though, they just didn’t use these types of cheaper performance boxes until 3.0. Until they make a solution for it though, getting into the habit of using the interact key to close these types of boxes could potentially somewhat alleviate the annoyance.