I noticed that when a repository has the “Allow auto-merge” option enabled, performing a PATCH request to update any of the other settings in the repository results in said option being disabled.

For example:

curl -X PATCH \
  -H "Authorization: token $GITHUB_TOKEN" \
  -d '{"has_wiki": false}' \
  https://api.github.com/repos/owner/repo

Given that the auto-merge option cannot be updated through the API, this problem makes it impossible to use the API to synchronize the settings of several repositories, since each time this is done, you would have to manually update the auto-merge setting.

Is this behaviour expected? Or is it a bug?