1 - wrinkling/cracking/flaking of green mask: Bare board was tin/lead plated *before* the solder mask (green film) was applied. Used to be a common practice to make bare boards like this. Modern boards are now plated after the mask has been applied. When this board was made and before parts were added - board was nice and flat. They placed parts on the board and ran it through wave soldering machine - all solder melts underneath the solder mask resulting in wrinkles, bumps, etc. Often the solder mask will crack and flake just like it is doing on your board. Ignore this - it doesn't hurt anything.

2 - solder blobs: Just poor workmanship. Looks bad but also doesn't hurt anything.

Assuming that is CN4.
This connector has three sets of four pins. All pins within the groups of four are tied together. Group 1 is also tied to group 3.
First four ground pins for coils, middle four power pins for lamps and four more ground pins for lamps (messiest joints). The four pins under the blob are supposed to be connected together.
It looks sloppy and it looks like somebody has been there before because I see flux on the board. But I do not see a short.
You could clean that up but you would need a good soldering iron to do that - there is a lot of mass there to soak up the heat and you could end up damaging the board. Unless you have a lot of practice with this, I would leave the mess alone.

For your board - I would be more concerned about capacitors. Especially C2 and C3 within the voltage doubler circuit.

Use either hole as long as the negative lead makes connection to the ground trace.