How to disable "gradient highlighting" when hovering over dataview lists?

Adjusting the spacing a bit (the above pasted a bit odd for me)

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You mentioned Dataview; what is the query rendering the list in your screenshot? Dataview has some styling with its results, but I haven’t see this before.

Do you have any plugins installed that could be adding that gradient to your nested lists or queries?

I’d try in in Restricted mode (with a restart) and no CSS snippets enabled (if you have any). Other troubleshooting steps to try.