Thank You, Thank You, Thank You!
I’ve been trying to figure why I couldn’t update my css or my .htaccess file for at least an hour now and this is exactly my issue.
I believe that this is because when inputted into the actual title tag the ampersand is encoded as & which is 5 characters. As far as I know it only counts as one character to google, but perhaps yoast knows something that I don’t.