"cascading" formatting in short reference entries

[jGaboardi]

I have been experiencing a "cascading" references formatting problem that I think may be within sphinx-bootstrap-theme, but cropped up somewhere in the change between sphinx==5.0.2 and sphinx==5.1.0. I am not confident that the problem is actually happening due to sphinx-bootstrap-theme, but I needed a place to start and hoped someone would be able to point me in the right direction if it has nothing to do with sphinx-bootstrap-theme. I have detailed the issue in jGaboardi/cascading_refs_bug with docs builds from several versions of sphinx demonstrating the formatting change from sphinx==5.0.2 to sphinx==5.1.0. I have searched of StackOverflow, but didn't find anyone else having this problem (maybe due to me using incorrect search terms). Any advice or assistance with this would be greatly appreciated.

xref jGaboardi/cascading_refs_bug#1, pysal/spopt#303, pysal/spopt#309, pysal/spaghetti#688

cc @martinfleis @weikang9009