(solved) weird escape characters when using nvim as a manpager

I use zsh and have export MANPAGER=“nvim -Rc ‘set ft=man’ -” in my .zshrc. this used to work well but since a couple of weeks ago, whenever I run man (e.g. man man) I get many weird escape characters (e.g. [4mMAN[24m(1)). when running man and manually piping the output to another program (e.g. man man | nvim -Rc ‘set...