Timeouts for refusing opponents you asked not to have

A couple of times recently I've picked up timeouts immediately after having had a game accepted by a player with a rating outside the range I have asked for.

I do not understand why this kind of pairing is able to happen in the first place, and more than once I've started a forum thread to ask why without ever receiving a satisfactory explanation. Be that as it may, I understand even less how it can count against you, at all, to decline to play somebody who you have specifically asked not to play!

This is all the more annoying when you look at the appeals page and it says:

"If you don't want to face lower or higher rated opponents, set a rating range on your seek." Why give this advice to users if in practice it doesn't apply and you make them plsy those opponents anyway?

Mostly I enjoy playing on this site but this is stupid.

What is the rating range you have requested ?

Does that matter?

I saw and ignored those forum posts because I have never been able to reproduce this issue from any of the ways I consume Lichess:
* from any browser
* from a mobile app
* from an API

Posters may have been able to help you if more information was available to them.

Sure, but the relevant point here is that opponents are either within the range or they are not, no?

I lost 2 minutes of my life reading this piece of nothing. Plus one for replying.

I hope more people come here to read, so I'm not alone in this quest to find nowhereland.

???

In the game / profile a rating may be rounded up or down.

If you are being matched with people outside the requested range, that's almost certainly a coding bug, so they are asking you details of what happened to try and find the bug so they can fix it.
I would strongly suspect that once the game starts, there is no record of how you found the game, so it would count against you in that case as well, which is why fixing the bug (if there is one) would be the top priority.