I was kind of thinking that was what I had to do, just disable it and see what happens. Global terms appears to be an abandoned feature. The documentation for it is very sparse and doesn’t really describe what it does in detail.
On this page, https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Function_Reference/global_terms, it says that terms are “synced”, which imply they exist in multiple tables (at least categories do – I verified the same term appears in a site’s terms and sitecategories).
One might assume that disabling global terms would mean that the site would continue working just fine using the date in each site’s terms table. Of course, you wouldn’t be able to re-enable global terms since the tables would drift out of sync over time.
Of course, that’s just an assumption. And you are right about there maybe being some term relationship references to the global terms. I don’t think so, but I didn’t even know global terms were enabled until they started causing problems.
