most appreciate way of reporting issues to Pywikibot is Wikimedia ticket system (tickets for Pywikibot are available under:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/pywikibot-core/). It would be great, if You could register yourself there and if in future have any issue with PWB, just repotr it there.
As regarding Your issue with <br> -> <br /> we already have a ticket fot that (
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T143083) and if You want to be up to date about it, yet again, register on Phabricator as add yourself to subscribers of this ticket.