In order for this to work without having to tell the plugin where the root is, I detect the root by recursively going up a level until a file CODEOWNERS or docs/CODEOWNERS or .gitlab/CODEOWNERS is found then stop. According to gitlab's rule, if multiple are found, it will use only the first one in the order I wrote.
Problem is if you are in docs/ and run this in a repo with /docs/CODEOWNERS, the plugin will wrongly assume that the root is /docs/ instead of the intended / (with docs/CODEOWNERS) and messes up everything. Rules that should apply to files in docs might not work now.