Like someone else who replied, I shortcircuited the whole thing & counted the delimiters (well, more specifically the spaces between the delimiters), assuming it was an obfuscation question not a "Haha! Tricked you!" question.

Took one skim of the code under the Tally CTE and my brain went "bleh". Seen much cleaner string-splitters.

An exercise in picking through nested functions & conditional statements if nothing else.