Ended up removing line 844 in staff-desktop.css – ‘white-space: pre-wrap;’ which removed the awkward block around the ‘i’ – which works for us. This is resolved.
FWIW, this is resolved by v1.15.4 / osTicket-1.15.4-Awesome-101. We are going to production with this next month, so I was looking at any issues others are having. I tested this one, and it’s fixed in our version.