How can I set up different default reviewers per branch in github without breaking merging?

Question

My goal is to have two branches in github, with different default reviewers:

• dev - Default Reviewers: srA, srB, jrA, jrB
• prod - Default Reviewers: srA, srB

As far as I know, the only way to add default reviewers to github is to use the .github/CODEOWNERS file.

We can have different versions of the file in different branches, but we run into a merge conflict when trying to merge from one branch to the other.

We can fix this locally by using merge strategies, but this doesn't seem to apply to github.