(nominornewtalk) isn't really the problem here, as it's behaving as expected. The problem is that minor edits with "Email me also for minor edits of pages and files" unset or (nominornewtalk) prevent notifications for edits after those edits even if no notification is sent.

When a page is edited, notifyOnPageChange() is called to send emails. That then calls out to updateNotificationTimestamp() to get the list of people watching the page. That function collects a list of editors where wl_notificationtimestamp is null, sets the timestamp to the current time, then returns the list.

notifyOnPageChange() then filters that list for users who have enabled email notifications and, if the edit is minor, have enabled notifications for minor edits. However, wl_notificationtimestamp is already set for all watchers regardless of if they will receive a notification or not. Without the notification, they are unlikely to visit the page and reset the timestamp back to null to receive further notifications. wl_notificationtimestamp is also used by Special:Watchlist to determine if an edit has been seen at all, so simply not setting it if no email is sent would break that logic.

Honestly, the reliance on wl_notificationtimestamp to determine whether to email users is the root of a lot of problems; IMO the easiest fix would be the addition of a field that indicates whether the user has been emailed about the page yet.

This problem seems to have now spread to articles, I have a couple dozen pages on my watchlist that I never received notification for, for example this edit by FrescoBot, this edit by QEDKbot, plus edits by BHGbot and Cewbot.

Genuinely curious the status of this - we're almost two years on from two "easy" fixes being proposed, and nothing doing.

In T250856#7853357, @Primefac wrote:

Genuinely curious the status of this - we're almost two years on from two "easy" fixes being proposed, and nothing doing.

The answer is that the relevant code isn't maintained by a team. Growth-Team is nominally responsible for Watchlist UI (per https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developers/Maintainers) but not the backend. Having a patch proposed may help move this along, but no guarantees, unfortunately.

I know this is unlikely to do anything other than annoy the folks watching, but on the off chance it motivates someone... any movement on this?

You can generally assume for all and any tickets that there is no progress apart from what can be seen in a ticket... :)
See also https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Development_prioritization for more context.