Defense Debuff abilities — do we know how they truly work?

There are several ablities and powers that affect enemies with a "Defense Debuff" status effect, such as Invasion, Munitions Training with Sustained Fire and Offensive Biotics with Exposure. The description text for all these abilities mentions that affected enemies "take more damage from all sources".

However, Annihilation's Damage Attractor evolution doesn't mention Defense Debuff at all, it simply states that "enemies affected take 20% additional damage from all sources".

Everyone here seems to assume that all the effects above function in the same way, i.e. 20% Defense Debuff is exactly the same as Damage Attractor: enemies take +20% damage from all sources. So why the difference in wording? Why doesn't Damage Attractor mention Defense Debuff?

What I'm wondering is that maybe Defense Debuff really just debuffs defenses, i.e. lowers enemy armor damage reduction (does armor even work the same way as in ME3?) and perhaps causes shields to take more damage from all sources. Or something.

On the other hand, Cryo Beam specifically states that it weakens enemy armor, and the status effect is "Defense Debuff vs. Armor", so that seems to indicate that Defense Debuff really is just an increase to all damage taken. But it's still weird that Annihilation uses a very different wording for a similar effect.

Has any/all of this been tested? To be honest, I haven't paid enough attention to these abilities to be able to tell, and I haven't even tried Invasion yet (don't have the Salarian Operator). Does Invasion really cause enemies to take 25%-35% more damage? Do enemies - even non-shielded, non-armored enemies - really take 40% more damage in close proximity to an Asari Adept? Or is this something players simply assume to be the case?