Surprising behavior when OptionsPattern is part of a larger pattern

Question

Say we have a pattern defined as:

pattern = {foo[OptionsPattern[]] ...};

We can then use MatchQ to see whether an expression matches pattern, and some simple results work as I expect:

In[2]:= MatchQ[{foo[a -> b]}, pattern]
Out[2]= True

In[3]:= MatchQ[{foo[]}, pattern]
Out[3]= True

In[4]:= MatchQ[{foo[a -> b], foo[a -> b]}, pattern]
Out[4]= True

However, other things don't work as I'd expect:

In[5]:= MatchQ[{foo[a -> b], foo[]}, pattern]
Out[5]= False

In[6]:= MatchQ[{foo[a -> b], foo[a -> c]}, pattern]
Out[6]= False

As far as I can tell, different occurrences of OptionsPattern[] all have to match the same thing for the pattern as a whole to match, much like named patterns, where {x_, x_} will match {a, a}, but not {a, b}. However, there doesn't seem to be anything about this in the documentation, and it's hard to be certain that's what's going on.

FWIW, there's an easy workaround, where you use

pattern = {foo[___?OptionQ]...}

Answer 1

We can see that unlike {x_, x_} two occurrences of OptionsPattern[] do not need to have the same content:

pattern = {foo[OptionsPattern[]], foo[OptionsPattern[]]};

MatchQ[{foo[a -> b], foo[a -> c]}, pattern]

True

We can also see that Repeated can in some cases work with OptionsPattern[]:

MatchQ[
  {foo[a -> b], foo[a -> c]},
  {_[OptionsPattern[]] ..}
]

True

MatchQ[
  {foo[a -> b], foo[]},
  {_[OptionsPattern[]] ..}
]

True

Curiously this also works:

MatchQ[
 {foo[a -> b], foo[a -> c]},
 {foo[OptionsPattern[]], foo[OptionsPattern[]] ..}
]

True

I shall continue to explore this but it might be a bug in pattern matcher, or at least an edge case since this isn't the normal use of OptionsPattern.