Is this cluster in yellow or green health? If yellow, does the allocation explain API shed any light on why it's not assigning anything to the wiped node? If green you might still get some useful information out of the allocation explain API if you try and ask it about a specific shard; if not, try manually migrating a shard and see whether that works.
One possibility is that delayed allocation is temporarily preventing any shard movement, if you restarted the node quickly enough. Another possibility is that allocation or rebalancing are disabled.