@roslof Thanks for testing/confirming the fix.
I must admit, it is not really a backward compatibility but restoring a functionality I accidentally scrapped with the last optimization roughly three weeks ago (before this fix). TIL it was designed by Aloshi this way. However it does not document the behaviour when h is greater than lineSpacing. I am currently updating the themes page of the RetroPie Docs to put more emphasis on this text+size thing.
For the wrap of Manager to the next line: IIRC you moved from 16:9 to 4:3 of epic noir didn't you (if not branch wise than at least display wise)? In any case: You may give the longdescription in the toplevel theme.xml of epic noir a little more x-space (<size> value is in percentage of total screenwidth) to keep the Manager on the same line (Ctrl-t and Ctrl-r are your friends). So no need for wordsmithing.
PS: It was the maintainer @pjft who did the merge, thanks.