Yes, a bug of sorts was introduced with CrossOver 8.
Although you have checked the permissions of your home folder, you may not have checked the ownership. We have had a number of users bitten by what we consider to be an odd configuration -- their home folders were not owned by their own account. Instead, they were owned by the root account and had permissions set up so that their own account could access the folder. For complicated technical reasons, a check was added to CrossOver 8 so that it refuses to carry out certain operations if you don't own your own home folder.
The Finder's interface for controlling permissions is a bit vague. It's hard to know exactly what it will do if you make changes and then select "Apply to enclosed items" from the action menu. So, I recommend that you work in the Terminal where the commands are much more predictable.
In a Terminal window, the following command will show you the ownership and permissions for your home folder:
ls -lde ~
You can use this command to change the ownership of your home folder and everything within it to your own user account:
sudo chown -R `id -un`:`id -gn` ~
It's important to get that command exactly right, including the punctuation, so you're probably safest to copy and paste it.
After you've done that, you have a couple of options to get your launch icons to show up. The first is to delete your bottles, recreate them, and reinstall your Windows software.
The other option allows you to keep your existing bottles and already-installed software: Launch CrossOver. From its Programs menu, select Run Command. Toggle open the Debug Options section of the dialog. Click the Open Shell button. That will create a new Terminal window and automatically issue a bunch of commands to configure it for use with CrossOver. (Due to some bugs in the scripting frameworks, the first such window may end up misconfigured. It can be a good idea to close it and click the Open Shell button again to create and configure a second such window.) In that window, you can issue the following commands to get the launch icons for previously installed programs:
cxmenu --bottle '<bottle name>' --install
cxassoc --bottle '<bottle name>' --install
where you substitute the name of your bottle for <bottle name> (putting the name inside the single quotes, as shown). Repeat that pair of commands for each bottle that you have.
Future releases of CrossOver should relax the check of the ownership of your home folder a bit. It should work if your home folder is owned by your account or by root. (If for some reason your home folder is owned by a different account, things will probably still fail.)
Sorry for the inconvenience.