They can, if you contruct it this way, but it wasn't constructed with a portal in between. Maybe you concentrate on the coordinates i have provided.
Portal 1a (overworld-old): 420,45, 1797(...1800)
Portal 1b (nether-old): 51, 45, 222 (...225)
Portal 2a (overworld-new): -618, 55, 1600 (...1603)
Portal 2b (nether-new) expected generation at: -77, 55, 200
Portal 2b didn't generate which should.
The 1024 are coming from the german translated wiki, since i also checked the english site, i tested with 128 in nether as well.
By reading more about this in the english wiki, i understand, that it normally should search a portal first, if not found THEN check surrounding (16 blocks radius) for possible creation and do so, but it seams that those steps are changed/mixed.
I had same "keeping entity..." stuff. I killed 2-3 of them. One of them was an iron golem, i killed it with kill uuid and replaced it by another one (built it, not summoned), but when i came back to that area of map, it was back alive. After second killing it seemed to work.
I also killed a sheep and a villager, but since i did all this, i get 30-40 lines of "Fetching addPacket for removed entity".
Any clue what i can do against this or what that means?
Confirmed for 1.8.4 stable.
You are right, sorry.
From the beginning, i was too fixed on those 1024 than to 128 (german wiki is not clear about this).