Editor inserting break tags

I’ve been working on a big form for quite a few hours, I pasted over the text from my editor into the Text box, then I click Preview and the form labels and inputs are separated on a new line; I look at the source code and there’s <br> tags there! I look back at the Text code and they’re not there! What’s going on?!

Nothing I do prevents the break tags. It’s like it’s seeing line breaks in the HTML code and for whatever reason thinking I needed an actual break on the page that displays! This is nonsensical. It should be assumed that if I’m able enough to edit HTML source code that I would know that actual line breaks don’t show unless I put a break tag there. It shouldn’t be assuming I meant to put an actual break just because I put a break in the HTML source code.

Is WordPress over-compensating for stupidity? I’m seeing no option to turn it off and not even any real good reason to do it, and it’s just getting in the way and messing things up. If I remove the line breaks where they turn into break tags in the source it makes the code hard to read.

Aside: I write the <br> tag in this post and it’s just deleted rather than escaped… this is really dopey. If we put HTML in this box, it should escape it as if we meant text. Who’s actually meaning to put parseable HTML in this box?!