I don't know much about vim, but from the report it sounds like part of the issue was that disabling modelines would not prevent it:

> tabpanel is missing P_MLE Unlike statusline and tabline, tabpanel is not marked with the P_MLE flag. This allows a modeline to inject %{...} expressions even when modelineexpr is disabled.

Edit: Upon re-reading the above I guess disabling modelineexpr is not the same as disabling modelines, and disabling modelines altogether might indeed prevent the issue.