mysql56-temporal-format had been disabled in MariaDB 10.1.17 environment. This seemed to work fine, but then the following errors around the innodb persistent statistics tables were observed in the MySQL error logs:

InnoDB: Error: Column last_update in table "mysql"."innodb_table_stats" is INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL but should be BINARY(4) NOT NULL (type mismatch).

I think this is related to mysql56-temporal-format=off - checking the tables I do see "MYSQL_TYPE_TIMESTAMP" rather than MYSQL_TYPE_TIMESTAMP I reenabled this option, recreated just these tables and these log messages went away and the tables are being populated as expected.