And that behavior of -printf is expected.  It is comparable to the POSIX behavior of -print.

The '-printf' expression (like POSIX -print) will print the file name being visited, then return true.

The '-type f' expression will check whether the file being visited as a regular file, and return true or false accordingly.

When two expressions are written as 'A B', find behaves if you had instead written 'A -a B'.  The -a operator is short-circuiting: if expression A returns false, expression B is not attempted; but if expression A returns true, then expression B is used.

When you write -printf first, it always executes (everything gets printed), then you filter out the files, but do nothing further with the files you filtered.

When you write -printf second, it only executes on the files that got past the -type filter.