Yes, this is correct. It makes a bloody mess that is nearly impossible to work with or edit.
This effect is much more easily achieved by duplicating the object, using transparency on one (to use as a visual guide) and on the other using the Divide command and adding gradient to each individual section (to match the transparent version), and the file will be hardly any size at all. It's nice, but not mandatory, to include your intact transparency version as an extra file in the zip.