Previously, everything was shared/synced by default now this is local by default. This is designed to reduce the risk of unintentionally sharing or syncing data to the Postman Cloud.
The change to the variable experience was introduced back in September 25. It also brought in a number of other improvements.
https://blog.postman.com/september-2025-product-updates/
From an export point of view, this would have been the same if you only had values in the current value field - those wouldn’t have been seen in the file.
More information about the change can also be found here: