Um, can you source that? Because, 1) that’s not how it should work at all, and 2) the information I’ve seen claims the opposite of that.
It makes no sense for the client to send the crafting progress updates to the server. The server should be the authority on the state of the game – unless you like having your game be easily exploitable – and the client should update its state based on what the server says. There are things that client should send to the server, but all of them involve player’s own actions (e.g. the player executed a heavy attack with the war axe and the client thinks it hit a skeleton).
So it’s the server that should be sending the client updates on the progress of fish, honey or thrall. And even then, it makes no sense to make it send an update each tick. If you’re in the area, the client can do the ticks on its own and receive an occasional update from the server, correcting any discrepancies. Here’s a fun experiment that allows you to see that behavior in action: put a yellow lotus potion in your pet’s inventory, watch its decay timer, wait for it to reach 0, notice that it hasn’t gone poof, take it out of your pet’s inventory and watch the decay timer reset itself to a value that’s a second or so lower than it was when you put it into your pet.
And if nobody is in the area of the crafting station, ideally it shouldn’t even be ticking. Instead, it can simply memorize where it was when it was “put to sleep” and at what time that happened. Then, when it’s reactivated by players’ presence, it can execute its “catch-up logic”: calculate the time that passed while it was “sleeping” and produce the correct results.
Not that any of this means that foundations are a big problem, because they generally aren’t 