I've improved my original question (needed to escape the <br> code there so the tag would show in my question).
So it's normal to put html markup in a Neo4j node property and have it respected by an 'app'?
Is it more likely that my Node.js is not respecting the html? If that's the case, I'll switch forums.
I’m not a node.js expert, but i’d guess that something is treating your html as “unsafe” user input and automatically escaping it in order to prevent some types of attacks (user-written html infecting harmful javascript code as an example)
If you know it is safe, you sometimes need to indicate that to templating languages (ie python flask requires that you indicate the template variables are safe content, else it’ll be escaped)