ESPHome repairs pulse counting and interrupt-driven inputs on devices using the RTL8720C chip. Reading an input could disable the mechanism that reports its changes, leaving pulse counters at zero and binary sensors stuck after their first change.
J. Nick Koston makes those reads preserve the active interrupt. Tests on a BW15 board restored counting with the default pulse filter and kept a binary sensor following a changing signal. The correction is specific to RTL8720C; it does not resolve different pulse-counting limitations on RTL8710B or Beken chips.