Happy premature New Year everyone! I hope everyone is looking forward to Dumpster Fire version 2021!

I'm certain I'm overlooking something silly here. I have a need to have in the manifest .gitignore files that are within test directories, but need to ignore the one at the top level of the distribution, while allowing the ones in sub-directories (which it does). I have in my MANIFEST.SKIP file the following line:

^\.gitignore$
[download]

That should, technically, skip over the .gitignore within the root directory of the distribution. When I run make manifest, the file is not added, as expected. However, when I run the t/manifest.t test file:

spek@scelia ~/repos/dist-mgr $ perl -T t/manifest.t 
1..1
not ok 1
#   Failed test at /home/spek/perl5/perlbrew/perls/perl-5.26.1/lib/sit
+e_perl/5.26.1/Test/CheckManifest.pm line 190.
#          got: 0
#     expected: 1
# The following files are not named in the MANIFEST file: /home/spek/r
+epos/dist-mgr/.gitignore
# MANIFEST: /home/spek/repos/dist-mgr/MANIFEST
# Looks like you failed 1 test of 1.
[download]

What gives here? The skip is working as make manifest doesn't add it, but it doesn't work when re-checking the file?