You set the background colors of those listed styles to whatever colors (or lack of colors) look good to you

…In case you don’t know how…

Use Settings > Style Configurator > Language: XML

Start with:

Then right click on the background color for SGML COMMAND:

Then right click on the background color for SGML DEFAULT:

Easy

@Jo-Su717 said:

Do you know if there is there a way to turn this off

You don’t turn the feature off. You set the background colors of those listed styles to whatever colors (or lack of colors) look good to you. Notepad++ makes those colors easily user-customizable for just this reason. If you don’t like the default color on this, or any other, style, set it to something you do like.

I assume you just upgraded to v8.9.7? If so, if you look at your change.log or the v8.9.7 announcement, you will see it says, 13. Make XML CDATA color different from the enclosed elements. Users wanted to be able to distinguish between the CDATA SGML-command syntax from the data it contains.

So now, the CDATA style (defaults to orange) only applies to the data contained inside, not the command wrapper itself. SGML DEFAULT is what’s used for the <![ and [ and ]]>, and the word CDATA itself is styled by SGML COMMAND

<![CDATA[2 blah blah blah]]>
^^^     ^                ^^^ = SGML DEFAULT
   ^^^^^                     = SGML COMMAND
         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^    = CDATA