**, *^ are not valid Mathematica syntax for powers.
and *^ is scientific notation
Also ^^ is the nnnn expressed in b-base
So the reason that ** had possibly worked before was that although it is not parsed correctly in Mathematica parser,
it somewhat got parsed in sympify as a valid python syntax and I think that it is completely wrong to parse it as power.
Actually, they are rarely used syntax for Mathematica that I didn't know that they existed,
and especially *^ and ^^ are much more limited that it only works with restricted classes of digits, with no symbolic capability,
and you can achieve the same thing with other Mathematica functions like FromDigits.
For example, the bases for ^^ is restricted only for 2~36 because after it exceeds 37, you will exhaust every digits 0~9 and English alphabets A~Z,
so if we are going to build parser for that, it must be considered.