In an interview with Nintendo Everything, the game's director, Masahiro Yamamoto, confirmed that the game takes place in a Kindergarten class within the Mario universe.

A can of "Starbeans Iced Coffee" can be spotted in the flip-side version of the stage "Poochy's Magma Run". This is a reference to the Starbeans Cafe found in Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga.

On a Billboard seen in Whistlestop Rails is an advertisement for Yo'ster Cookies Flowers, paying tribute to the game Yoshi's Cookie.

Prior to the official announcement of Yoshi's Crafted World's title, a fake leak was posted on 4chan listing off future Nintendo games, containing the title of Yoshi's Crafted World. This leak was humorous in nature, contrasting legitimate sounding titles such as Animal Crossing: Town Founder and Paper Mario: Clay Catastrophe with obvious jokes such as Metroid: Equestrian Races and Rhythm Heaven and Hell. This led to a short-lived theory that the leak was indeed real and slid in the joke names for humorous effect. Over time, reveals of installments in other franchises featured in the leak that didn't line up would show that Crafted World was simply a lucky guess. However, some other articles from the leak, such as a multi-part DLC pass for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Pokémon Diamond and Pearl remakes, a Tokyo 2020 Mario & Sonic Olympics game (albeit without Pac-Man), a Switch port of Overwatch, and the at-the-time-believed-to-be-cancelled Pikmin 4 would come into fruition later by coincidence.