In case anyone else runs into this same issue, the problem is the following line in wp-blog-header.php (line 3):
if (! isset($wp_did_header)):
The bug is the whitespace between “!” and “isset”. Remove that space so the line reads like this:
if (!isset($wp_did_header)):
and all is well 🙂
How does one go about reporting this to the wordpress development team for the next release?