How to deal with nested fields limit

It's a limit on the number of fields declared in the mapping as type nested - not the number of array elements you choose to add as values for any of those fields

See this flowchart to help decide. You shouldn't need nested if you only search on single fields at a time - it's when you AND properties from 2 different fields that the "cross-matching" problem occurs and you need to reach for nested to make the objects different matchable entities.