In 2016, someone else had the same issue and posted about it here. Despite my word count being below 250 (248), the form told me that “Your updates exceed the allowed length - please edit your response.”
To be able to submit, I reduced my word count to 243 and took out dashes that weren’t attached to words, either replacing them with semicolons or attaching them to words ([word- word] instead of [word - word]).
My conclusion is that either the word count is secretly 243 exactly for some reason (244 words didn’t work) or that the form counts certain dashes or punctuation as words. I don’t think that there is a hard character limit because I put paragraph indentations back in and it worked and the person with this issue in 2016 had a higher character count than I did.
Good luck to anyone else having this issue.
Omg that happened to me! I had to shorten mine from 250. It was sooo frustruating