This is caused by a silent patch that has rolled out to address fullscreen and popup sandboxing issues with extensions using gesture APIs. A chromium forum engineer posted the changed code which explains how to fix it.
-> Open chrome://flags.
-> Search for ''Touch events API'' and set it to ''Enabled''
-> Search for ''User Activation V2'' and set it to ''Enabled''
-> Click the restart chrome prompt.
If you are interested, the patch code that fixed (but broke) extension gestures API: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/6b20212bdffccd581703de1f229921151ea4750b/extensions/renderer/bindings/api_request_handler.cc#264
Source: https://community.softwaregrp.com/t5/Unified-Functional-Testing-User/UFT-14-03-Build-3501-not-recognizing-Google-Chrome-71-0-3578-98/m-p/1681220