HELP - Understanding Sort List Tree Mapping

the general case, when you have many items in one input and “less than many” items in another input, the last item in the “less than many” list gets duplicated until they have the same number of elements

you can get the very same behavior by applying a Longest List component to your data streams and see what happens

in this case it’s about Lists, so the tree with less lists gets duplicated, like this: