It turns out that the extra whitespace before and after the section headers in the body appears when I put \startcolumns[n=2] before the body text and \stopcolumns after it.  Here's the MWE, just slightly modified from your example:

%%%% begin example
\setuphead
   [chapter,section,subsection,subsubsection]
   [before={\blank[nowhite]},
    after={\blank[nowhite]}]

\setupwhitespace
   [medium]

%\showgrid

\starttext

\startcolumns[n=2]

\completecontent

\chapter{Chapter}

\samplefile{knuth}

\section{Section}

\samplefile{weisman}

\subsection{Subsection}

\samplefile{weisman}

\subsubsection{Subsubsection}

\samplefile{weisman}

\stopcolumns

\stoptext
%%%% end example

On Sun, Mar 22, 2020 at 10:07 PM Wolfgang Schuster <wolfgang.schuster.lists@gmail.com> wrote:
T. Kurt Bond schrieb am 22.03.2020 um 23:37:
> I got LMTX running on macOS Catalina.  I followed the directions here
> <https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Installing_ConTeXt_LMTX_on_MacOS> for
> versions prior to Catalina, including authorizing the mtxrun script
> through Security & Privacy General tab.  The first run of install.sh
> stopped with the errors:
>
>     cp: cannot stat
>     '/Users/tkb/context-osx-64/tex/texmf-context/scripts/context/lua/mtxrun.lua':
>     No such file or directory
>     cp: cannot stat
>     '/Users/tkb/context-osx-64/tex/texmf-context/scripts/context/lua/mtx-install.lua':
>     No such file or directory
>
>
> So I ran install.sh again.  This time it said a bunch of things were
> missing and downloaded them.  It seemed to finish ok, so I ran context
> on my document and it produced a PDF!  (The ConTexT with TeXLive 2018
> and TeXLive 2019 both died on this document with different unhelpful
> errors, by the way.)
>
> Both LMTX and TeXLive 2019 ran 5 to 10 times slower than TeXLive 2018,
> and both complain about "fuzzy paragraphs" with a list of U+XXXX
> codepoints.  What's that mean?
>
> However, the PDF has unwanted whitespace in many areas.
>
>   * It has unwanted whitespace between the entries in the Table of
>     Contents.
>   * It has unwanted whitespace before and after section headings,
>     despite me having "before={},after={}" in the \setuphead commands
>     for all the levels of sections.
>   * And it had a large unwanted white space between paragraphs until I
>     \setupwhitespace[none]. I'd prefer a little bit of white space
>     between paragraphs, but I tried \setupwhitespace[0.5ex] and
>     \definemeasure[between][0.25ex] with
>     \setupwhitespace[\measure{between}], and \setupwhitespace[5pt] but
>     all those went back to way too much white space between paragraphs.
>
> Any ideas?

Do you have a working minimal example for the problem because when I run
the following example on my machine there is no extra whitespace.

%%%% begin example
\setuphead
   [chapter,section,subsection,subsubsection]
   [before={\blank[nowhite]},
    after={\blank[nowhite]}]

\setupwhitespace
   [medium]

%\showgrid

\starttext

\completecontent

\chapter{Chapter}

\samplefile{knuth}

\section{Section}

\samplefile{weisman}

\subsection{Subsection}

\samplefile{weisman}

\subsubsection{Subsubsection}

\samplefile{weisman}

\stoptext
%%%% end example

Wolfgang



--
T. Kurt Bond, tkurtbond@gmail.com