Justification from Valentin Rothberg:
The benefit of making this change after the deadline is to fix a regression. Auto updates allows for using custom authentication files per container which is not working anymore. The fix is minimal and non-intrusive, and I do not see a risk of causing issues by fixing the bug.
The commit in question for backporting is https://github.com/containers/podman/pull/11357/commits/de3920c0e970324f9d5238c13caf1020efefbd7f
Once we have an ACK, I will open a PR against v3.3.2 as suggested by Dan in comment #3.