Forcing HTML to be escaped with Twig

i did not have to intentionally do what the Twig documentation warns against (putting the escape strategy in a variable, so that Twig doesn’t know )

Likewise, {% autoescape 'html' %} was no help.

In the Drupal context, what worked was first rendering, and then escaping:

<description>
{% for item in items %}
  {{ item.content|render|escape }}
{% endfor %}
</description>