It seems like when using a repeating group, on page load, Bubble does not yet have the list of items you want to render in the RG.
So what it does is it temporarily “fills” the RG with “empty” items of the type, potentially as a DOM loading optimization. Let’s say your RG container is 100x100 and each group is 10x10 - you’d have 100 items max rendering inside the RG container.
Then, once the data loads, it will cull back the extra unused groups in the RG back down to the number of items you have.
The downside to this behavior is that if there are elements inside the RG group that depend on the data of the group, and those elements are say like custom plugin elements that aren’t meant to handle null or empty values, they will vomit all over the place when their update() function gets called with empty and potentially cause some broken behavior in the application.
Is there a way to get the RG to just wait until the items are loaded? I’d rather the RG load slower vs. rendering empty groups for a split second