Google Docs – Change Text Highlighted by a Comment

You can:

1. Insert a new table row at the new location for the existing row. To do so, place the mouse pointer on the row where you want to place the new one, then press the left mouse button to open the context menu and choose either "Insert row above" or "Insert row below".
2. Right-click and drag to select all the contents on the old row, then cut the selected contents (CTRL+X); the old row will remain there but it will be empty.
3. Right-click on the first cell of the new row to select it, then paste the contents cut before (CTRL+V).
4. Delete the old row. To do so, place the mouse pointer on the old row, then press the left mouse button to open the context menu and choose "Delete row".

This is obviously not a great solution, but it might be better than recreating the entire table from scratch?

It looks like Google is going to be rolling out an update which is supposed to fix the issue. In the meantime, I ended up using a workaround which was satisfactory for me, though a little extra time-consuming. I read a few places about "soft returns" AKA "manual line breaks" which is what happens when you do a Shift+Enter (or Shift+Return). I had heard of these before but never knew what practical use they had. I replaced all the vertical whitespace-creating line breaks (wherever I had previously hit Enter on a blank line) with Shift+Enter soft returns and when I copy-pasted the document into the text editor this time it did not add the extra line breaks. I was thinking about trying to do a search and replace with regular expressions to save myself all the manual edits but now it looks like I may not have to if the update works.