I have this issue when working in Smart object and camera raw, I am using the latest version of Photoshop 21.2.1
When creating gradients masks inside the camera raw and save the changes I see these strange circles over the image. These circles are exactly where the edits are done. The only way to get rid of them is closing photoshop and reopen the file, sometimes it erases the circles right away another time I can to reopen the camera raw and save changes again.
This is the first time I see this behavior. I have a high-end workstation, 68Gbs RAM video card RTX 2080ti