Why does VSCode insert irregular whitespace instead of normal whitespace?

when i'm writing my markdown, very often VSCode changes whitespace to something else, e.g., # Example -># Example. It looks the same, but it's not whitespace (eslint says no-irregular-whitespace which is how I was able to spot it, but in MD this doesn't show).

> `#  Hello`.charCodeAt(0)
35
> `#  Hello`.charCodeAt(1)
160
> `#  Hello`.charCodeAt(2)
32
> `#  Hello`.charCodeAt(3)
72

It causes a lot of trouble occasionally. Why does it do that?