Footer Icon Spacing Issue

I'm using the "footer basic" but I've noticed there are some weird spacing issues with the icons

Spacing issue example

This appears on both chrome and firefox, but not every time. It appears to be fine, then will randomly appear and not go away. There are no console errors and I can't see anything in dev tools that it is adding. Dev tools think there's nothing in between the icons. Highlighting the icons does highlight the empty space though.

Spacing issue highlight

Interestingly, after some more looking, in firefox I can see a whitespace-only text node character in between the two icons, but it's not in the outputted code and I can't see this in the Chrome dev tools...

Console Image

It probably has something to do with the icons being treated as text by the browser, and this particular footer implements them in a weird way using pseudo classes. I've seen similar behavior before in some of the online components. I'd just ditch the whole thing and make my own footer from scratch.