It appears this has occurred in earlier versions of 8.1 and we have an existing ticket to handle this. I’ll link this post to it so that you can be updated when it gets fixed.
This was marked as “Solved”, but I only see that it was being “worked on”. As of 8.1.7, I am seeing similar behavior in both Flex Row and Column containers, where any alignItems value other than “Stretch” causes a height of 0. I don’t see the promised link, so I don’t know if this was really solved, or if the OP was premature in marking it “Solved”. If it was solved, then it is broken again.
The link was an internal link within IA which allows them to know which posts to update when the fix has been applied to a nightly. You can tell that it has been linked as the Title shows the internal ticket number. [BUG-2280].
It is possible that the bug has been resolved in a newer version and this post has not been updated, but the IA team is pretty good at updating a thread when a ticket has been closed.