Weapons target acid splashes and file. This especially includes laser weapons as they tend to target fire puddles instead of the source of the fire puddles.

the error is not reproduced
I need your save
At the same time, this will allow me to look at your question from the next branch, since I do not see anything unusual in the behavior of spawns

Not sure what you mean by "not reproduced". Wear power armor with personal laser defense. Go attack inferno biters. Realize the lasers attack the fire breath and almost die.

Repeated the above steps. Laser defence does not attack fire breath.

I'm asking for a save because there might be a specific combination of mods that changes biter/weapon attacks.
For example, the combination of SE + K2 + CMO broke the attacks of fire and inferno biters - you need to use the "alternative attack" setting.

Apologies. Here is a link to my save: https://ufile.io/svg1wgiy

My guess for what's different is the water and fire extinguisher mods.

Unfortunately, this file sharing service is not available from my country. Can you upload the file on google?

I have similar thing happening in my save: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-tWjbnGeXeN180pVIKsQO-8YxsQC4rWs/view?usp=share_link

I have a lot of mods there and I'm not sure if the issue is caused by rampant or something else.

In the save my player should be at where the attacks are taking place. There is some stuff on the ground that the companion Dave and the defender drones attack. Not quite sure what is there as it isn't mouse-targetable

I am also having this issue https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-QXQqKgXHkapcxRuZgH5NL5Jf06tock7/view?usp=share_link
I installed mid-playthrough and died :) since my turrets were all hitting a puddle

freakinabox,
Everything is fine in your save.
Shots and puddles of standard biters are not attacked by drones and turrets.
Rampant spitters - the same, except for the shots of the "wasp" faction.
This is by design: the wasps shoot drones, the task of which is to divert the fire on themselves. The shots of the "spawners" faction behave in the same way, only in the place where the projectile hits an egg is formed, which, if not killed within 5 seconds, will spawn 5 small biters.

hoho,
I was unable to get the game to launch with your combination of mods. Maybe the answer above will be useful for you too.

so what we are seeing is turrets shooting fast small drones that move around (noticed those) and eggs on the ground that should die? I might have mistaken the second one for it being behind a tree or something. I'll keep this in mind and if I see them shooting what I think is a puddle again I will send over a save looking at the exact thing.

I think the reason it didn't work for you was that I forgot I had edited some info files of the mods to enable some mods that were marked as incompatible to still work together (IIRC deep core mining and spaceexploration). Sorry about that. If you're still interested and are willing to spend a couple of minutes extracting and modifying the files I can tell you what needs changing and how.

For me it is definitely not the wasps or their drones. The attacking of puddles was happening long before any of those biter types spawned.

I'm not 100% certain the cause is your mod. I also have this thing: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/WaterTurret
It has a setting that allows toggling the water turrets to target or not target puddles for extinguishing as well as turning off their targeting of nests/biters.
Though I'm also 100% certain that isn't the mod that is causing the problem since I had the issue long before I ever installed the water turret mod.

Currently I suspect there is some other mod in my pack that messes around with turret targeting logic without having a relevant configuration option for it. Not sure I can find it considering the pack has over 300 mods :)

If you have ideas how I could test/debug the targeting logic I could try looking into it myself.

I believe that if you have modified mods, then you should give a link to the archive with your mods.
Yes, I'm still interested in this.

This is the two mods that I changed to make it load, only about 3.4MB. Synchronizing with the save and then copying these two mods to mods dir should be enough:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pDWb2FWEGjlyxsoqfhVzYnLryheKIuVY/view?usp=sharing

Here is the whole modpack, just replace everything in mods with it. About 2.2GB:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/15Gnh-XLGIlAHSZtjMX4XH-xnBG0vWVKw/view?usp=sharing

There will be a message about a changed recipe on loading the save but that doesn't change anything of relevance. One of the mods got updated between making that save and packaging up the mods folder today. As said, the save was made mid-attack coming from the North and you can see follower bots and turrets targeting random spots on the ground with nothing mouse-targetable there

The result of testing the save:
Bots attack entity "WT-fake-fire-burnt-putch" from mod "Water turrets".
The entity is located just below the acid pools - I managed to find it by removing the pools in the editor

Nothing can be done by changing the my mod

Thanks for the information!