I just did the same bisect to verify, and found that the refcount miss was introduced in:
commit 4799ebf565c7c1ed84dd8fc0aa0d050ef9aee325 Author: Martin Nilsson nilsson@fastmail.com Date: Tue Jan 3 19:17:59 2017 +0100
String addition code from per/simplified-operators branch.
Which seems much more likely.