[v1.5.42 ] Broken HTML in replacement tokens

I have the Comment Count field rewritten to this

<a href="{{permalink}}#comments">{{comment_count}} Comments</a>

Updating the plugin to v1.5.42 breaks HTML tags in both frontend and QW preview.

Commenting out the line 405 in includes/theme.php fixes the problem

// update the token for replacement by later fields
//$tokens[ '{{' . $field_name . '}}' ] = $row['fields'][ $field_name ]['output'];