Given that there was no change from developers across the games observed, it must be something on itch.io's backend.
Viewing post in Weird wave of updates?
Read that again.
whenever a developer makes a minor change to the page itself like editing the text description, updating tags, adding new screenshots
The update date of a page is the update date of a page.
Is this about the Itch app? That would be front end. Propagating or even downloading phantom updates, while nothing was there to be downloaded, seem like a bug.
Yes, I can read, there was no change *even in the pages*. A bunch of games just started showing an update, both in app and in the "More information" dropdown under the Updated part.
There was no new content to the games, and there was nothing added nor changed in the pages, no screenshots added, removed nor changed, etc.
Hence why I concluded it was itch's backend. So yeah, probably a bug.