for posterity, I went through the caps and cleaned up some corrosion on the spring. It seems like they might get a bit of moisture ingress on the wire attachment point (or its just high voltage doing its thing). It fixed 80-90% of the issue. I ended up swapping the plug wire assemblies and its fully cleared up.
From taking these apart, I believe these are resistor caps, since there appears to be a resistor in them, but as far as I can tell the stock plugs are resistor plugs, which you wouldn't normally stack up. Maybe something needed to get around a poor canbus layout.