Certain exclusion flags seem to be ignored

Note that [ and ] mean something in the filter glob language, so you need to escape them.

I suspect you meant this - note the \ to escape the ] and the single quotes so your shell doesn't interpret the \ and the leading and trailing * to match this anywhere in the string.

--exclude '*\[{JP,KR,HK,CN,RU,PL,AU,GB,FR}\]*'