Below is an image of an imported SVG (of course it's the same SVG for both versions of Blender!) notice that 2.79b does a much nicer job of "extruding" the 2D shape and filling.
In both cases, extrusion depth is set to 0.0001m and no other settings are changed.
Now, let's see Blender's 2.8x handling of the SVG:
Really ugly! What's causing this difference? I can turn the Resolution Preview U in 2.8x down which makes the SVG look a little nicer.
In 2.8, the import initially looks like this in 2D:
Why can 2.7x do something better than 2.8x can?!
I'm initially creating my SVGs by generating a PDF with LaTeX and then using pdftocairo to convert the PDF to an SVG.