Goodness I hope this is good because I will make my company gobble it upppp if so.
Or is there some kind of gateway standard that I'm unaware of?
This can be used to add whatever authn/authz you require to apps that don't even support authn/authz. I'm using Traefik ForwardAuth with Keycloak for Jaeger SSO in a couple of places.
That is: I wouldn't hold off on a PR just because they said they're going to get around to it; if the PR works, and is merged, that's one less part they have to write. If they don't merge it, then the bad faith you're discussing will be a concrete fact and not speculation, and will serve as a warning to others not to bother submitting more PRs