Also, did you check that the docs still build without warnings
from a range of Sphinx versions and that the rendered HTML still
looks the same ? These trailing spaces were largely added deliberately
in commit 09ce5f2d6bd6739144, with the comment
* rST does not like definition list entries with no actual
definition, but it is possible to work around this by putting a
single escaped literal space as the definition line.
so we should be careful not to delete them again unless we've
confirmed that we definitely don't re-introduce the issue that
we put them in to avoid...