I think there's a confusion in terms. I'm using class var to mean global to the whole class and each instance of the class.

The confusion is yours. You've been saying the above, but you haven't been doing the above. Like I said, your instance constructor populates the class attributes instead of the instance attributes.

There shouldn't be multiple initializations

Then they should be initialised outside of any function.

Does this clear anything up?

No. I understood fine all along.