For multi-project pipelines, CI variables set at the project level for the downstream project not made available to the downstream pipeline

Note: CI variables refer to secret variables set at the project level, not in gitlab-ci.yml

Using multi-project pipelines I would expect that CI variables that are set for the downstream project are available to the downstream jobs. This does not appear to be the case.

Example pipeline https://ops.gitlab.net/gitlab-com/gl-infra/deployer/pipelines/81311 (internal)

GITLAB_QA_ACCESS_TOKEN is defined as a CI variable in both the upstream and downstream project.