How does renderer.material instances work?

If i understand the documentation correctly, sharedMaterial is the default. By using renderer.material, a new instance of sharedMaterial is created that will only affect the object that called the code. If i make a change to sharedMaterial on another object with the same material, it will no longer affect the first one as that has its own instance now. I may be mistaken here but assuming i am right, can anyone explain the following behavior: I use renderer.material on awake of a function to gradually fade in my GO. Another script calls renderer.material on awake so i can animate the GO. They both run at the same time and it works well, but i do not understand why that works. I believed that the script to last call awake would change the instance to one it can reference and the one that first called it would now be pointing towards a material no longer associated with the GO so only the last called scrips affect (either animate or fade) would work. It works so maybe i should not complain, but i clearly misunderstand whats going on so clarification would be great! Thanks in advance.