The explosion permission defaulted to vanish.* was tolerable, but now that you add
the vanish.lightningbarrage one to vanish.* , fire is created whenever I simply want to log in.
My question, then, is why even have that effect/permission in the first place?
At the very least, remove vanish.lightningbarrage from vanish.* . In fact, I no longer use the plugin
because of it. Not using vanish.* isn't possible, because I use op-override permissions.

Hopefully this will be fixed in the next version.

vanish.* means "OMG EVERYTHING EVER" which includes all feature requests ever incorporated into the plugin. This includes:
explosions
lightning
smoke effects
ALWAYS being hidden from dynmap, no matter what vanish status
ALWAYS quitting silently, no matter what vanish status.

vanish.* has always been and will continue to be a terrible idea, provided merely for convenience for people who like to set every node to true without reading documentation. The recommended solution continues to be assigning vanish.standard and then assigning the additional desired nodes, or not even starting with that and just doing individual assignment. Permission node assignment should take no more than a minute or two for a set-once-and-forget approach to permission handling.

I am interested in your "op-override permissions" issue. Last I had checked, it was possible in any plugin to set nodes as false overriding other statuses. What plugin or lack thereof are you using that's resulting in troubles with permission setting?