Is there a simple reason why this has happened to some of my workflow actions? That is, the background colour. And I can't seem to change it.
As luck would have it, I just answered this exact question from somebody else only a couple of days ago What does the Blue/Grey Striped Background of an action signify?
To repeat my answer from there: That's KM8's new way of showing you that an action contains the text that you're searching for in the KM editor's search field:
Just make sure there's no text in that field and this e̶f̶f̶e̶c̶t̶ background should go away.
I find that amusing for some reason. Also funny, if you search for blue stripes, your post doesn’t appear. If I had just searched for stripes, I would have seen it. So I don’t feel too bad, because now this will show up if someone searches for blue stripes. Great feature, now I know what it is!