Beginning in Q1 2021, committers@ of Chromium will no longer be able to circumvent code review and OWNERS approval on CLs.
Currently, these are circumventable by self-code-review and because the enforcement is done by presumit, although rarely done by external contributors. In Q1, Gerrit will disallow both bypasses. As part of the transition, an audit service will automatically file bugs for CLs that land with only self-approval, launching in Q4 2020. Within Google, where these bypasses are more common, Googlers can find Google-specific information in the internal announcements and landing site.
Periodic updates and FAQs will be sent to chromium-dev@chromium.org and updated on this page.