These checks were added fairly recently, 3 months ago, and are present starting at Arduino-ESP32 2.0.5. Previously there were no such nullptr checks and the internal logic was slightly different.
These buffers are allocated when Wire.begin() is called (source). So, if that error occurs, either your code or one of the library you use do not call into Wire.begin(..); before trying to do a I2C transaction. The code changes in Wire.cpp probably only made a bug in your code or a library’s code visible that was there all along.
To counteract this, you can try do
Wire.begin(SDA, SCL);
as the first call in setup() (given SDA and SCL are your I²C pins).
Alternatively you can use a debugger and set a breakpoint at where it throws the error message in Wire.cpp. When the breakpoint is hit, it will show you the call traceback, i.e., which exact piece of code did try to do a I2C transaction before Wire.begin() was called. That is then the culprit.