thank you all for your contributions! I am quite new to all of this, but a way around it was using another Playwright function that allowed to manipulate the HTML string to match the text. So, instead of using :text-matches I used inner_text()

Please find the code snippet that was modified below:

while names_to_find:
    # Get all <tr> elements in the table body
    rows = page.locator("table tbody tr")

    # Iterate over each row in the table
    for i in range(await rows.count()):
        # Get the name in lowercase
        name_unit = await rows.nth(i).locator('td[data-label="nameunit"]').inner_text()
        name_unit_lower = name_unit.strip().lower()