well if anyone's also wondering how to get out of that mess, this trick seems to work for me:

instead of getting the issue body as json or markdown, request it as html, and somehow that weird token will be in there,

gh api \
  -H "Accept: application/vnd.github.html+json" \
  -H "X-GitHub-Api-Version: 2022-11-28" \
  --hostname <HOST> \
  /repos/ORG/REPO/issues/123