I tried the notebook with Catalina only. The behaviour is the same in both 12.1 and 12.0 for me -- I had to remove and restore the colon to make it "compile".
So I can't help with the problem but I have some observations to share: 
I run "diff" on the original and "corrected" version. 
Original version contains: 
RowBox[{"nPoints_", ",", "setUpAltsFunc_", ",", " ", 
RowBox[{RowBox[{"radius_", ":"}], "1.0"}], ",", " ", 
RowBox[{RowBox[{"scaleFac_", ":"}], "0.0014"}]}]
The same part in modified version:
RowBox[{"nPoints_", ",", "setUpAltsFunc_", ",", " ", 
RowBox[{"radius_", ":", "1.0"}], ",", " ", 
RowBox[{"scaleFac_", ":", "0.0014"}]}]
You can see that in original version splits pattern between RowBox differently -- in original version defaults are separated from the pattern.