The generic problem is documented in docs/design.md under the section "Wikitext constructs split across top-level content and templates".

AttributeExpander has a bunch of complicated hacks to handle attributes in wikitext tables. Similarly TableFixups has a bunch of complicated hacks to handle this in other scenarios.

It is worth thinking of ways to redo this to simplify the complexity. It may need us to rethink tokenization a bit to enable simplifications in both these places. The original 2011-2012 decisions expected to influence wikis to tweak their templates to not do string combination. That option is also still on the table to nudge wkis, but that will require better support for what editors are trying to do with those kinds of templates.

Overall, this problem will need a closer integrated look to clean up.