Nicholas, thanks for trying. i am also unable to reproduce it. i notice there appears to be a new org-plus-contrib, and i suppose that might be a factor. (or, i messed up somehow.) presumably, this is a dead bug.
in case it's *not* dead: i notice in my notes i had found this ---- https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/46923/orgmode-table-error-shrunk-field ---- that seemed to (10 months ago) describe my issue. and, the stack trace was: ---- Debugger entered--Lisp error: (invalid-function org-table-with-shrunk-field) org-table-with-shrunk-field(nil) org-self-insert-command(1) funcall-interactively(org-self-insert-command 1) call-interactively(org-self-insert-command nil nil) command-execute(org-self-insert-command) ---- cheers, Greg