Bailey, do you still have this issue? If yes — can you please share a test file and a video of the behavior?
Technically, gradient swatches in Illustrator are secretly global, and if you modify manually one fill of one objects using the swatch, the linkage breaks... but it seems like it does not in your case. I’d love to know more. Please reply.

Proof that Illustrator stores created gradients as a hidden global swatch. The user doesn't know about it and doesn't care. Until we try to create scripts to work with gradients, then everything breaks down. And we can't script to break this link, only manually before running the script

So that's why recent Gradient Blender script (https://ais.sergosokin.ru/color/gradient-blender/) warns about this behavior in this short video: https://ais.sergosokin.ru/content/uploads/cycle-gradient/fixGradient.mp4
Pretty annoying.

Lance, I think I know what Ankit meant.
You won't be able to catch this manually, but it hits hard when you start using scripts that deal with gradients.
Here is a blog post about this by Sergey Osokin, https://ais.sergosokin.ru/blog/all/copies-of-gradients/ — and its English translation from Google, https://ais-sergosokin-ru.translate.goog/blog/all/copies-of-gradients/?_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en

So, unless a gradient is edited in any manual way, Ai secretly thinks of separate fills as identical copies, and change each one, when you edit only one of them.
Here’s the GIF from yet unpublished script to demo it.

Can you provide more details? Unable to reproduce this issue.

I set up a very simple CMYK document and created two objects and then applied two different default gradients, a different one to each object. Adjust object1, the object2 remains as it was. Adjust the object2 , and object1 remains as it was after I first adjusted it.

Adjusting one gradient causes changes to unrelated gradients on same document.
Applies to both on-canvas operations and scripting methods.

Problem Description:
Gradient tool affect appearance of other objects. When using the gradient tool on a shape, other objects with added appearance (e.g. gaussian blur) will reload.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create lots of shapes and add gaussian blur to them.
2. Crate a new shape and add a gradient.
3. Use the gradient tool to adjust the gradient.

Actual Result:
Appearance (gaussian blur) of the shapes start reloading.

Expected Result:
Change of gradient. No loading of appearance of other objects.

選択していないオブジェクトのグラデーションが勝手に変更されます。
また、UIがおかしくなります。

The gradation of an unselected object is changed without permission.
At the same time, a problem occurs in the UI.

Graduated tints apply to unselected objects when I change the colour on the slider. Its really impeding my workflow - in fact its not possible to work with. If I'm working on a large scene, suddenly all of the grads are messed up.

I'm working on a late 2015 iMac running Mojave