Hi Ford!

Our documentation on the subject mentions this:

If one doesn't use any connection name prefix for a replicate.. variable, then the value will be used as the default value for all connections that don't have a value set for this variable.

with the intention to help aid in configuring multiple channels with shared variable values. Generally, with multi-source replication, it'd be best if your connections all were named, and the default connection was used just for the "global configuration" baseline. Then each named connection in your my.cnf would override those global defaults.

I'll also look into the null report, that seems broken