Bridge "write hierarchical keywords" is unchecked, but it still adds the path to nested keywords

I have a large, nested, hierarchical keyword structure in Bridge that I have built over the last few decades and find very beneficial and don’t want to flatten it, which I read somewhere might solve my problem. I have “Write hierarchical keywords” turned off in preferences, but Bridge still writes the whole path into keywords nonetheless, using a vertical bar separating the levels of the path. One of my stock agencies will not accept images with these vertical bars and the many duplicate keywords thus in the keyword list. As a workaround in the past I have imported the images into Lightroom Classic and then exported them and it has remove all of the path level extra keywords and the vertical bars. But yesterday with I was doing this with a batch of 500 images, it started did this, but also erased all of the metadata, including keywords, in half the images. Does anyone have a suggestions how to fix this problem?

I am running Windows 11 Pro on high end custom built desktop.

Thanks!