Hi Gary welcome to the Webflow forum.
You haven’t shared the project but I suspect you are talking about style changes.
Think about the symbols, elements inside has class names so if you change any styles for those class names it will be applied to all those elements with the same classnames.
So what I mean is even if you unlink the symbol, class names applied to those will still remain the same. So the style changes will apply to all those elements.
With symbols, only if you change the element position, you’ll see the difference.