The flag is especially for variables used in the list template, which are NOT part of the multirow (or db_multirow). The template::list iterates of the multirow tuples and needs the information, what other variables have to be provided in the "display_template".
Without looking at the details, it might be possible to modify the implementation of "display_template" to include all global variables, but - maybe for a good reason - this was not done at the first place.