If you put five paragraphs in, you get five columns. Ideally, you'd want to have paragraphs flow down the left-most column, then over to the right-most, and not necessarily breaking at the paragraph tag. It would also need to scale somewhat with window size.
I found that the css column-count does not work with display: flex. If getting rid of display: flex and adding column-count: 2 it works and you don't need the break-inside: avoid. I haven't used column functionality at all before, but look at this: w3schools.com/css/css3_multiple_columns.asp