VPA Custom Resource Traversal

[cmtly]

Which component are you using?:
vertical-pod-autoscaler

/area vertical-pod-autoscaler

What version of the component are you using?:

Component version: 1.5.1

What k8s version are you using (kubectl version)?:

kubectl version Output

$ kubectl version
Client Version: v1.32.7
Kustomize Version: v5.5.0
Server Version: v1.33.1
Kubecolor Version: v0.5.2

What environment is this in?: kind

What did you expect to happen?:
I have a scenario where a pod has the following ownerReferences chain:

pod -> intermediate type -> parent type

The pod has an ownerRef that points to an intermediate type and the intermediate type has an ownerRef that points to a parentType. Both the intermediate and parent types are custom resource types defined by my operator. I want to add a VPA resource whose targetRef points to the parentType and manages all the pods owned by the intermediate types. I added a scale sub resource to the parent type per these instructions whose selector returns a label common to all the pods. The recommender successfully provides a recommendation as the RecommendationProvided condition is true. The admission controller and updater, however, do not update the pods.

What happened instead?:
Instead of updating pods or annotating them as they're scheduled I see the admission controller log No matching VPA found for pod.

How to reproduce it (as minimally and precisely as possible):
See above.

Anything else we need to know?:
Its not clear to me whether this is a bug related to how the top level scalable is found when custom types are involved or whether this functionality is simply not supported.