OK, turns out its still doing it. any help?!
[SOLVED] The issue was I had both a captcha field AND the captcha toggle switch on on that specific set of field items in ACF. Think there could be a better description or implementation here as its a bit confusing that you can do both and what the use case might be there.
didnt have:
acf_form_head();
on every page. I added to my header.php now
making the field names short worked for this issue.
e.g.
Repeater field name: inno
Field in repeater
Title: innovation text field
Name: i