Every perpetual venue runs its own funding mechanism against its own order book with its own participants. The rate is a local price for leverage on that venue, and the moment you average several of them you have produced a figure that nobody pays and nobody receives.
The spread is the signal
What is worth watching is not the level but the disagreement. When one venue is paying meaningfully more than another to hold the same exposure on the same asset, that is a positioning imbalance concentrated somewhere specific, and it usually resolves.
It resolves in one of two ways. Arbitrage flows in, the spread compresses, and nothing much happens to price. Or the crowded side gets squeezed, and the venue carrying the imbalance is where the liquidations start.
Read it with open interest
A funding spread on a venue carrying very little open interest is trivia. The same spread on the venue holding most of the exposure is a much larger fact, because the positions that would have to unwind are actually there.
This is why funding and open interest should be read together, per venue, and why a product that shows you one blended figure for each has removed the relationship you wanted.
Cadence differs too
Venues settle funding on different schedules, and some adjust the interval under stress. A rate quoted without its interval is not comparable to one quoted with a different interval, and annualising them without accounting for that produces confident nonsense.
The practical read
Look for the venue paying most, check whether it also holds the most open interest, and check whether the spread is widening or closing. Widening with concentration is the setup worth watching. Closing is the trade already being taken by somebody faster than you.