I figured out the problem, at least why I was getting this error in my case, I wanted to post my solution in the hopes that it might help someone else out.
The error message was misleading in this case, in fact the problem had nothing to do with the shards for the index. While I was only applying 2 minor query options in the Kibana Discovery pane, the amount of additional crap that Kibana software appends to the query that is run against Elasticsearch behind the scenes is ridiculous. I saved the query that was crapping out in the Kibana Discovery pane as a saved query. I was then able to grab/copy the query that Kibana Discovery pane generated. I then pasted this query in Kibana DevTools. I ran the query in Kibana DevTools and it gave me a more accurate error message. The error message was relating to highlighting on a particular text field that huge amounts of contents in my case. So I modified that query in Kibana DevTools to remove the highlighting code, at that point the query would run in Kibana DevTools without problem. I then had to figure out how to disable highlighting for the Kibana Discovery pane, so that the query would also run there. The option to disable highlighting in the Kibana Discovery page is located at Mgmt > Stack Mgmt > Kibana > Advanced Settings : Highlight Results defaults to true, disable this option. At this point, I no longer get sharding related errors for this particular case.
References: