It seems to have started slowly. For me, Github releases have failed to serve requests for hours already.
$ f_\abs{x} $
$ f_\pi{x} $
LaTeX just happens to do what the post calls "runtime parsing" because LaTeX doesn't really distinguish between different compiler stages at all. If you look at a macro, you can't know whether it will eat up the following braced argument. #for x in range(5) [
Value is #x
]
And `range(5) [..]` therefore needs to be different from `range(5)[..]`. This aligns with normal formatting conventions and I haven't seen this become a problem in practice.