Gitlab runner helm chart upgrade broke the variables

We recently upgraded our gitlab runner helm charts from older versions to the latest Gitlab runner version(0.50.1) and this broke our jobs with variables definitions in the config.

Here's an example gitlab job definition:

release_job:
  only:
    refs:
      - master
    variables:
      - $VERSION
  stage: release
  dependencies:
    - build
  tags:
    - platform
  script:
    - echo "Making release available on S3 for autoupdate on version ${VERSION}"
    - for file in *.tar.gz; do aws s3 cp ${file##*/} s3://varocli-artifacts/${file##*/}; done
    - for file in *.zip; do aws s3 cp ${file##*/} s3://varocli-artifacts/${file##*/}; done
  release:
    name: 'Release $VERSION'
    tag_name: '$VERSION'
    ref: '$CI_COMMIT_SHA'
  artifacts:
    name: "varo-cli-$VERSION"
    paths:
      - varo-cli-linux-amd64-$VERSION.tar.gz
      - varo-cli-windows-amd64-$VERSION.zip
      - varo-cli-darwin-amd64-$VERSION.tar.gz
    expire_in: never
 CHANGELOG.md 

This worked until the upgrade and stopped working after the upgrade. here's are the logs: before:

Uploading artifacts...
varo-cli-linux-amd64-1.1.30.tar.gz: found 1 matching files and directories 
varo-cli-windows-amd64-1.1.30.zip: found 1 matching files and directories 
varo-cli-darwin-amd64-1.1.30.tar.gz: found 1 matching files and directories 
Uploading artifacts as "archive" to coordinator... ok  id=3940221 responseStatus=201 Created token=o_ztDFQp
Cleaning up file based variables

after:

Uploading artifacts...
WARNING: varo-cli-linux-amd64-$VERSION.tar.gz: no matching files 
WARNING: varo-cli-windows-amd64-$VERSION.zip: no matching files 
WARNING: varo-cli-darwin-amd64-$VERSION.tar.gz: no matching files 
ERROR: No files to upload                          
Cleaning up project directory and file based variables