Empty Paragraphs with Comments

I have been developing sites with WordPress for almost as long as it has existed but this is a new one for me and, oddly enough, is on my personal site. It’s running the OceanWP theme using Elementor as the editing platform and I have tried running without any plugins and the issue doesn’t disappear. Everything is completely updated and they are all standard-release packages.

In many of the content pages, I am finding empty paragraphs including HTML comment tags. I have no idea where they’re coming from but they look like this…

<p><!– wp:paragraph ……. [more stuff here sometimes] —-></p>

They often appear in groups of two or more between actual paragraphs and headings containing content. The problem is that they are taking up actual vertical space between content elements. Sometimes they include references to styles, other times to paragraphs, columns, headers, etc. I certainly didn’t add them. I have manually removed many but they seem to periodically return. No idea where they’re coming from. If they all followed the same pattern, it would be relatively easy to strip them out of the database en-masse but the spacing appears to be completely random, some with many linebreaks, others with only one, the content fluctuating with the only real common element being that it’s a paragraph tag containing nothing but a comment.

This is driving me absolutely crazy and I’ve spent hours trying to troubleshoot it but I’m not farther along.

Anyone run into this before?