Numbered bullets cause JSON error with block editor

Hello, after hours of troubleshooting and eliminating every other potential cause (permalinks, .htaccess file, changing to default theme, deactivating plugins, mixed SSL content, etc.), I found that I cannot edit or publish a post using the block editor after copying a numbered bullet list into my post draft. This is as of today, as I published a post with the identical format last night and have been doing so for the past two months without issue. I made no changes to my site since yesterday, no new plugins, etc. The only plugin update that I got an email for yesterday was Monster Insights; however, I already tried deactivating all of my plugins including that one which didn’t resolve the issue.

For context: every time I create a post, I copy the contents from a Word document (rough draft workspace) into a WordPress post draft, and doctor it from there before publishing. There are several sections copied over from the Word doc with basic bullet lists. These seem to work fine still because when I include only bullet lists in my post, it still saves. But if I include the numbered bullet list (same indented format, just using numbers instead of bullets), it throws the JSON error.

Before I realized the numbered bullet issue, the only way I could save was installing the Classic Editor plugin, but that is cumbersome and would require a lot of time to learn which seems unnecessary when block editor is much quicker. After some time with Bluehost support and trial and error, I copied parsed sections of my post into the post draft and was able to save. That’s how I realized the numbered bullet list was the part that wasn’t saving.

I’m not sure how to reach out to the block editor development team about this. In the meantime I can change my formatting of course but it took a good while (and installing the Classic Editor) to pinpoint this issue. It would be nice to know if it’s due to a new bug or whether to anticipate any more formatting incompatibility surprises without having to spend hours searching for the cause.

Sorry this is lengthy. But I wanted to clarify what I already tried and have already found out. I appreciate any help!