It is generally believed that no follow links are nearly invisible to SE, but not 100%, and Google is known to crawl them sometimes. Also other SE than Google may give them some weight, but Google does not.
Google is trying to fix the “no follow mess”, and their last move which does not make sense (to me) shows that they have stepped into the nofollow quicksand.
My guess they are going to have a lot of ad hoc tricks to make sense of it all; but for us, it is quite clear that a no follow link is a dead end, is it not?