At least a partial dupe of T179259, I think?

The dupe part is that this is the same "Parsoid reserializes templates to respect the wiki's templatedata for them" behavior. (Cite_book and Cite_journal are both format: "{{_ |_=_}}")

The non-dupe part would be that it is modifying the whitespace in the templates that're just adjacent to the ones you actually modified. You modified 5 of them, but 11 got normalized. Can you remember whether you opened those templates with no content changes and closed the dialog by choosing "apply changes"? That'd probably be enough for VE to have resaved the data and thus for selser to think it needs to rework them despite no real content difference.

It's been a few days, I'm afraid I don't remember any details beyond what I reported.