just merge this?

Not much has changed since #6830 which did not receive approval.
(and like jow noted in that PR, the proposed list already contains quite many ancient users who haven't been active for a while)

I'm not sure why that PR was closed. The discussion turned into enabling an automatic reviewer assignment. To enable this it needs to configure a team. Here I recreated the PR because even without this step this is just a list of github nicknames of maintainers. If some maintainer is not active anymore we can remove it from the list and from the package maintainer field. Anyway if someone creates a PR they'll find same persons and CC them. But we can simplify this step.

I guess this is in the catagory "better than nothing". But anyway, somebody needs to make decision, either merge or not. Waiting for the all singing and dancing solution will likely mean nothing will happen.

I've read earlier revisions of info on this document and found some things left unexplained. More recent revisions seem much more clear.

https://github.com/github/docs/blob/main/content/repositories/managing-your-repositorys-settings-and-features/customizing-your-repository/about-code-owners.md

But... unless a user mentioned in the CODEOWNERS file has write permissions to this repo, it's nothing more than a glorified reference document (so no behaviour changes will result, at present standards; a good thing). The document needs to be maintained, however. Do you commit to maintaining it?

no problem, please merge

I also added the link to CODEOWNERS to PR template. Maybe it also worth to add a link to issues but we may probably overwhelm maintainers. We better to do a triage ourselves and mention a maintainer if needed.