restarted obsidian and it made things look weird
turns out the auto update had added this
Developers
New CSS variables:
--p-spacing defines the spacing between paragraphs (defaults to 1rem).
--heading-spacing defines the spacing above a heading when it follows a paragraph (defaults to 2.5x paragraph spacing).
but one of the things about obsidian is that not only does it let you customize your theme, it also lets you create a css snippet that will override without having to edit the whole theme
body {
--p-spacing: 0px;
--heading-spacing: 0px;
}
place in $ObsidianVault/.obsidian/snippets, enable it, and done
...and now I'm thinking of other minor annoyances with this theme that I can possibly fix now that I know about this