Yes, they are "wrong", but not "WRONG!".
As I (possibly poorly) explained, I'm running on an aarch64 machine, but am trying to run armv5tel and armv7hl chroots.
I just dug out an old kernel I was using (4.4.72) and I can now chroot just fine.
So it's something that changed in the kernel, but I'm not sure what else it could be other than the page size (which I already checked).
I'm going to build the latest 4.4.172 with my 4.4.72 config and see if that works. If it does, I'll try to make oldconfig that on 4.9.153 and try again, see if that breaks things again. I was just hoping there might be an option I missed in 4.9 that enables/disables downward compatibility.
Gordan