what exactly is it was there a non mod method around it? or did i just get lucky and never see it?

i've heard that once an item is stolen all items that are the same as it get marked as stolen, and npcs react to it as stolen. like guards will take all of them for the rest of the game, and that shop keeper always acts badly to those items, right?

now i've had the npc that i've stolen from react to the stolen item being sold back to them but never had them react to the items if they weren't the exact ones that were stolen.
and this is a straight up vanilla copy of the game.