(In short: the animated transition on that thing may not be completing, accounting for seemingly random spacing effect.
It’s worth playing around with animated show/hides to see how it is that you can cause them to misbehave. As an example, make some element like a group with a solid color background and a text element in it.
On some trigger, animate it out with a long transition time like 2000ms (WF Step 1). Put a Pause step right after that with a far too short wait time (like 150ms) as WF Step 2. For WF Step 3 animate that element back in or just show it.
What you’ll find is that your animated in element retains the incomplete transform caused by the interrupted animate out. (As I note in that other thread this is easiest to observe with the “3D” type transforms like spin, but all of the animated transitions save for Fade exhibit this behavior.)
To fix, adjust the following pause to be at least as long as the transition time.
This is not necessarily a bug. It seems to be simply how the animation library implemented in Bubble behaves. You must ensure that animate outs/ins have time to complete fully or the element’s transform will not be correct (default orientation/position/etc) when next shown/hidden.
That this manifests more often in Live mode may be related to certain behaviors inherent in debug_mode. (Note that version-live can also be run with ?debug_mode=true, but many folks don’t realize that.)