Why are the leading and trailing whitespace in a text node encoded?

[KBHertzog]

See the below example.

The behavior exhibited has caused me some issues with auto links, resulting in the encoding being treated as part of the autolink when running the output back through unified remark-rehype. Just wondered where this behavior originated?

[Saul-Mirone]

Prosemirror will use them to handle the leading/trailing whitespace to avoid bugs in some browsers like older versions of ios safari