Currently, all Zarf components default to being optional due to the required key being optional in the yaml. This leads to behaviors where a package author must ensure they are careful to annotate this key for each component--though the validation doesn't require them to so assumes a sort of "all things are optional" default state.

When Zarf was first created, we didn't really know how it would evolve and this key was introduced in those very early days. I think at this point it would be better to require all components by default--especially with the introduction of composability and the OCI skeleton work, there is plenty of flexibility in the API to compose bespoke packages assembled from other packages.

I see a few ways we could handle this:

1. Simply force the required key to be a non-optional, so that package authors would be forced to specify it for each component, thereby removing any ambiguity--but also force one more key for every single component every created 🫠

2. Deprecate required and introduce an optional optional key, which would default to false. I do think this still feels strange if you did something like optional: false.

3. Do something more significant like combine various condition-based things such as only, optional (instead of required), default, I would have said group, but... 😆