In https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=659677435 three groups of <nowiki> tags were added.
The first two groups seem to be useful to escape wikitext-like content (maybe user error, but useful).
However, the third group is just empty, and therefore unnecessary: <nowiki></nowiki>
Reproducible on the command line as follows:
[subbu@earth tests] echo "<p>*This is a long sentence here that will make the nowiki algo split up the nowikis into multiple pairs\n|** Make this another long long long sentence forcing the nowiki algo to split up the nowikis </p>" | node parse --html2wt --fetchConfig false <nowiki>*</nowiki>This is a long sentence here that will make the nowiki algo split up the nowikis into multiple pairs <nowiki>|</nowiki>** Make this another long long long sentence forcing the nowiki algo to split up the nowikis <nowiki></nowiki>
Change 216873 had a related patch set uploaded (by Subramanya Sastry):
WIP: T97430: Ignore marker meta tags during nowiki escaping
Change 216873 merged by jenkins-bot:
T97430: Ignore marker meta tags during nowiki escaping