There are some oddities in the telnet version, such as it conflating XTerm and PuTTY, and it presenting a bizarre timeout message when presented with a blank TERM environment variable. I wouldn't be surprised if it somehow thinks that NVTs cannot have more than 256 columns.

Alas, that's the part that has no source available. (The TELNET server class library has published source, buried in a hyperlink in a comment to a closed issue from 2019, but the actual program built to use that library has not.)