I can also verify this and it has been posted as an issue on github
https://github.com/retropie/RetroPie-Setup/issues/863
Regarding the “never needing to push a hotkey on the keyboard before where escape and f1 just worked” this has been issue since around January and to be honest I think its an issue with the retroarch code and the “nul” key binding this is the post I had on it a while back and never really sorted it out (I just changed the hotkey to alt from the setup script)