When you're in autocommit mode, BEGIN starts an explicit transaction, but after that transaction (either COMMIT or ROLLBACK), you return to autocommit mode.
The situation being described upthread is a case where a transaction was started, and then rolled back by the server due to deadlock error. So it's totally normal that you're back in autocommit mode after the rollback. Most DBMS handle this identically.
The bug described was entirely in the client library failing to surface the deadlock error. There's simply no autocommit-related bug as it was described.