found it - seems to be caused by uBlock Origin.
Strange because i already had disabled it previously. Weird though on how it does not display the page at all

when using this website:
https://www.perthnow.com.au
after clicking on a news item link, the "back button <" shows a blank webpage until you refresh the page.
This is apparent on at least three Chrome based Browsers in Microsoft Edge, Opera and Brave and also another different browser engine in Firefox.
Curiously Google’s Chrome browser itself seems to work.