Yes, I tried your approach as well for completeness. It also did nothing. The file is still 1,628 MB.

I've also tried copying in rows from workbooks that do not have this problem, copying cells likewise, doing the same from another sheet in the same workbook, using format painter to copy the formatting from unaffected rows and cells, and deleting the rows without unhiding. None of these have had any measurable effect on the file size.