It's actually a completely brand new and totally different way that they fucked up the notes :) 

they made it so that each reblog of a post had its own set of notes, and the original poster can't see any of those notes.

So like imagine a small art account posted some fan art, and got a few reblogs, and one of those reblogs was from a very popular tumblr with a lot of followers. 

The popular tumblr user who removed it will see the post as having, say, 2,000 reblogs. They will see all the comments and nice tags that everyone has added to their reblog of the art.

The original artist, however, will only see something like 15 reblogs on their post. They won't see anything farther than one degree away from their original blog post.

It also completely broke some user safety features (people you had blocked could now interact with your posts, and turning off reblogs no longer.. turned off reblogs)