SharePoint Online - what is the cause of SharePoint's use of these characters "   " to randomly designate spaces?

Question

Has anyone else experience this and possibly know why SharePoint Online does this?

Our SharePoint Online indiscriminately replaces spaces with "   ".  And sometimes, a paragraph even breaks at one of these, then I need to edit the html, delete the "   ", and replace it with just a space which fixes the problem.

Here is a little chunk of the html from one of our pages.

 <p>Emails mistakenly identified as spam are also&#160;easier to retrieve&#160;from&#160;your Outlook  

         <strong>Junk Email</strong> folder.&#160; No more need&#160;to&#160;sign&#160;into a quarantine portal to look for an&#160;expected, overdue&#160;email.<br/></p> 

Our Sharepoint Online instance also seems to have an unhealthy obsession with <span></span> too.

I originally posted this to the Microsoft Community,