Does WordPress support a shortcode calling itself from within a shortcode call?

This is a known issue. If you have one shortcode inside another which has the same name, the wordpress parser will not be able to handle them correctly. This is also mentioned in the codex page for shortcode API under limitations.

From the linked page
However the parser will fail if a shortcode macro is used to enclose another macro of the same name

The solution i suggest is to add extra parameters to the main shortcode call & in your shortcode function, recursively call itself based on if those extra parameters are present

EXAMPLE

[column count="9" child="8_9" 8_9_text="

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" /]

Then in the code

function shortcode_handler($atts, $content, $tag) {
    if(isset($atts['child']))
        $output = shortcode_handler(array('count'=>$atts['child']), $atts[$atts['child'].'_text'])

    // Do something else with the output

}

I know it doesn’t look good but maybe you can work something out in the context of your application.