WTH does the Gauge in the gauge card show an "entity is not numeric" error

When using a gauge card in Lovelace, why does an error message like “Entity is non-numeric: sensor.canon_tr7500_series_black_bk” appear instead of still displaying the gauge itself, but adjusting the gauge to show that the device is unavailable? In this case, when my printer is off, so many Lovelace error messages appear where in fact we should see the gauge card, but changed to handle “non numeric” cases in the case of unavailable.