There haven’t been any non-bugfix changes to the main site in months, so in that sense, it’s certainly unintended.
This bug and the other (variants) two (partial translations) you’ve diligently found all have the same root cause – empty strings being added to untranslated segments.
The overall problem is that there are two behaviors covered by this change. Previously:
- An empty string could mean that a segment was omitted in a translation (such as with repetition).
- A missing translation key entirely could mean that it should fallback to the root language (such as with a translator’s name)
There is no distinction between the two now. But there should be, in one way or another (either same as before, or explicit values like <omitted> or <fallback>, or something else)
If I’m not mistaken, generally localizations fallback to the root language rather than leaving blank. That does a few things:
- Makes you aware that it isn’t supposed to be blank
- Allows you to use a translator
- Makes it more likely someone may contribute a translation
There are different ways of handling it, but purely blank is confusing and inconsistent UX IMO