@ekim First of all, a quick fix for your situation with next-hop: add { } after the next-hop that is missing it. I.e.:

route 192.0.2.1/32 {
    next-hop 203.0.113.10 {}
    next-hop 203.0.113.20 {
        distance 5
    }
}

Oddly, I could not reproduce having a config rendered that way without braces on 1.1.8. I'd be interested in a reproducible procedure for doing it.

A real fix for it is a complicated question though. Here's what's going on. Next-hop is a so called tag node: a node that can have child nodes with arbitrary names (as opposed to a set of predefined names).
The old config parser currently expects to know it from the formatting, which is why they are rendered like this, with seemingly redundant braces:

route 0.0.0.0/0 {
    next-hop 10.217.32.254 {
    }
}

However, in your config, it's not rendered that way, and the parser thinks it's a leaf node with a value.