Note payloads are padded to a multiple of 4 bytes in size, but the size of the string that should be print can be smaller e.g. the n_descsz field in gold's version note is 9, so that's the whole size of the string that should be printed. The padding is part of the format of a SHT_NOTE section or PT_NOTE segment, but it's not part of the note itself.
Printing the extra null bytes may confuse some tools, e.g. when the llvm-readobj is sent to grep, it treats the output as binary because it contains a null byte.