Background information

While looking at the cause for MC-87988 (Fishing rod sometimes cannot reel in entities) I noticed that the code explicitly defines that reeling in items only lowers the durability by 3 instead of 5 for other entities. This was new to me because I never knew that you can or could reel in items with fishing rods. It is currently impossible to do this, but looking at the Wiki this behaviour seems to be known already

Hooking entities

[…] Reeling in while hooked to an item will cost 3 points of durability, while reeling in while hooked to any other entity will cost 5 points of durability.

My appeal to you

MC-101001 (Fishing rod cannot pull items) describes the bug that you cannot reel in items now. Feel free to vote for it to increase the attention it gets

TL;DR Based on the code one of the developers intended fishing rods to be able to reel in items, feel free to vote for MC-101001 to increase the attention it gets