Google Docs Formatting – Why Did Google Docs Start Consolidating Multiple Newlines into Single Newlines?

Up until yesterday, documents looking like this (note the 2, 3, then 4 newlines between letters):

a

b


c



d

Would be copied and pasted in plain text (e.g. in a plain text area on a web page, or a plain text editor like VSCode or GEdit) just like they look in the document, and just as I typed them (pressing Enter twice at the end of a line, no "after paragraph" spacing tomfoolery.)

As of Jan 11th, 2018, it seems the exact same document (and every other document I've tried so far) now gets copied with double newlines stripped down to single ones:

a
b
c
d

Context

For my particular use case this is really annoying, because I'm editing Markdown and this necessitates an extra regex replacement to put all the newlines back every time I change a document. Since I often make changes using the Google Doc as the "single source of truth" (because of its collaboration and history features), then copy and paste them into another context where they're actually used, this would mean adding a hundred regex replacements to my daily workflow for nothing.

What I've tried (to no avail)

1. Installing the Docs Offline plugin, the one you're annoyingly prompted to install whenever you use Copy from the context menu instead of Ctrl+C, and reloading the page.
2. Restarting my computer completely (and not restoring tabs, using fresh ones for any Google Docs attempts.)
3. Using Firefox instead of Chromium (and Firefox never had this problem before today, either).
4. Asking a colleague to try this in Windows (I'm using Linux Mint)–it's also broken there (for him, at least, contrary to one commenter's experience, perhaps due to inconsistent rollout from Google? I have no idea.)

Why did they change it? Will they change it back?