the WDL lexer accepts acf key value pairs defined like this:
"KEY = VAL"
and in fact so does the archon internal parser after acf generation, recognising the key as KEY.
However, the regexes used in wdl modegen appear to not strip whitespace from the keys, resulting in them seeing the key as "KEY " rather than "KEY". This then causes mode generation to fail unexpectedly and with a cryptic error message unrelated to the actual problem.
Either this extra whitespace should not be allowed at all by the wdl lexer (though it would work in a hand written acf file), or modegen should be fixed to allow this too.