Look in the Project Properties to see if the flag that turns on JSON representation of lists is turned on.
The ( ) wrappers are obsolete, compared to the JSON encoding.
You should not be applying a text length block to a list. That forces text conversion of the list, into whatever is your current default.
There are better blocks for testing lists, like
is list empty
I covered that in a prior post.
P.S. Read the Introductory articles on How to Work With Lists