What do these brackets in viewport overlay text mean? I'm still pretty new to Blender 2.8, and all of the sudden these symbols (&lt;&gt;) started showing up next to the name of every object. What do they mean?
According to the manual, as stated in 3D View documentation, it is the name of the current marker.

The fact that there are only brackets with nothing between them probably means it has been renamed into a blank name.