It’s the inconsistency that makes me think it’s not intentional. Maybe “bug” is a strong word, maybe more of an oversight? The profile, observation notes, and comments are all user created text. If it was intentional and by design I would think it would be treated the same in all three areas in the app. Having long blocks of text with no whitespace is difficult to read. The fact that they display properly on the website indicates the formatting is stored with the text in the database, but it’s either being stripped out or just not handled consistently in the app.
I have a hunch that it might also depend on if the user created the text in the app or on the website, since I did see a couple of profiles displayed in the app where there was whitespace and text formatting as expected.