Yeah I wondered that or the bullet character too. The thing is we referenced other apps that used this exact formatting. But yeah, could just be a bug that was introduced at the beginning of the year that hopefully they can figure out and fix.
I've been having the same issue with an app. Random rejections with a single line copy-pasted from the (genuine) feature list in the app description. In this case the lines just start with a regular dash ("-").
This together with the sometimes 10+ day review times makes it impossible to maintain an app on the Play Store now.