CODEOWNERS approval optional instead of required on MR

This is for GitLab 14.0.5-ee on-prem.

This is a continuation of what started as a question/discussion at https://forum.gitlab.com/t/why-is-the-code-owners-approval-optional-on-the-mr/56548.

I have a situation where a code owner is listed as an optional approver on an MR when she - for all I understand - should be a required approver as per the code owners file. The MR is against a protected branch but the "CODEOWNERS for protected branches" is not in play here as we don't have this feature.

Here’s .gitlab/CODEOWNERS

Notice how I do not use the caret ^ character.

# Documentation at https://docs.gitlab.com/14.0/ee/user/project/code_owners.html
# Files can be specified using the same kind of patterns you would use in the .gitignore file. It uses globbing
# patterns to match against file names.

/integration-messages/**/*.yaml @user-having-permission-to-approve

approval_state REST resource

Upon pulling the /projects/project_id/merge_requests/mr_id/approval_state resource from the API I noticed two things

• the code owners rule is there
• the approvals_required for that rule is set to 0 <- THIS to me is a bug

Stripped down version follows

{
  "approval_rules_overwritten": true,
  "rules": [
    {
      // regular rule here
    },
    {
      "id": 44657,
      "name": "/integration-messages/**/*.yaml",
      "rule_type": "code_owner",
      "eligible_approvers": [
        {
          "id": 189,
          "username": "user-having-permission-to-approve",
          "state": "active"
        }
      ],
      "approvals_required": 0,
      "users": [
        {
          "id": 189,
          "username": "user-having-permission-to-approve",
          "state": "active"
        }
      ],
      "groups": [],
      "contains_hidden_groups": false,
      "section": "codeowners",
      "source_rule": null,
      "overridden": false,
      "code_owner": true,
      "approved_by": [],
      "approved": true
    }
  ]
}

Related issues

I checked #322513 (closed) and other related issues but none seem to apply.