Not at all. The reason for this non-intuitive behavior is state accumulation. That is why you were asked to think about boxes inside boxes. You will still need a Y value of -33.6. Because of another feature called state leak.
Values leak across separators.
In this example, not much. You want to keep the cone on the same branch so you CAN affect them all with the first translation. It is used to position the entire column structure relative to other objects in the scene. To get a material or transform to affect only the objects you want, create separate branches. Subdivide the branch at the top of the tree into two or more branches.