Your issue isn't relevant to this thread, but I would double check to make sure you have animations enabled. If you don't, we basically blip the windows in and out of existence now when switching workspaces, per this change, otherwise it'll animate as it has before. Any issues with the animation itself are ones with Mutter and its internal version of Clutter, which is used for the EASE_IN_QUAD animation that we use (and is actually kinda foobared in a newer Mutter).
The extra spacing I'll take a look at, but I did just push another package update to unstable that fixes a show_all
call in the panel manager that may have been responsible for the gap creation, but I can see later. If you have producible steps, screenshots or a desktop recording and after testing against budgie-desktop
release 219
in unstable (below) I'd suggest filing a bug on the Budgie Desktop GitHub repo.
sudo eopkg install https://mirrors.rit.edu/solus/packages/unstable/b/budgie-desktop/budgie-desktop-10.5.1-219-1-x86_64.eopkg