I also argue that failing to syntax highlight this correctly is a security issue. You can terminate block comments with Unicode escapes, so if you wanted to hide some malicious code in a Java source file, you just need an excuse for there to be a block of Unicode escapes in a comment. A dev who doesn’t know about this quirk is likely to just skip over it, assuming it’s commented out.
I once wrote a puzzle using this, which (fortunately) doesn't work any more, but would do interesting things on older JDK versions: https://pastebin.com/raw/Bh81PwXY