We have modules that only have manual configuration metadata. For those, we don't use META-INF/spring/additional-configuration-metadata.json as this file is used by the annotation processor to merge metadata from generated ones. And the AP won't kick-in for a project that doesn't have any code with automatic metadata.
Those projects only have a static META-INF/spring/configuration-metadata.json and do not apply the org.springframework.boot.configuration-properties plugin.
Because of the former no check is applied on the file that's still written manually.