gitlab throwing an export error for variable declaration - oddly never throwing it before - god knows how

Question

I have the usual section

variables:
  DESTINATION: "dev" 
  dev-SERVERNUMBERS: "0 1"

And, this had been working all long and suddenly. Gitlab CI is complaining and giving the following error message

/bin/bash: line 103: export: `dev-SERVERNUMBERS=0 1': not a valid identifier

Initially, I thought I was exporting something wrong. But, it looks like that is how gitlab runners work they export your variables to make them available to all jobs within your pipeline. I have NO export statement within any before_script.

I can understand why it is complaining because it expects the variable to have double quotes around it in order to export. But, it DID NOT complain now for atleast 2 months, so I cannot understand why now ?

I find gitlab-ci just so unpredictable and extremely frustrating to use. By now, if I had automated this build of mine via shell scripts I would have be on my way. And, I have been stuck on this error for 3 days now. It does not even print out any debug echos that I have set up and straight away gives this line number which has nothing to do with my .gitlab-ci.yaml At the very least it should give the verbose command that is trying to execute.