Hey @jude,
Did you see Stefano’s response about using shift-enter to insert a line break? To the editor/parser, they are different things:
Semantically they are different, but if on the frontend you want empty paragraphs to still be displayed as newlines, you can either do what you did (replace them manually) or use a CSS rule like:
p > span:empty:before {
content: ' ';
white-space: pre;
}
To render them as newlines, as in this example: https://codepen.io/roger-datocms/pen/JjzjqdB
