Lint/RedundantRequireStatement: false positive on pp

[akimd]

Expected behavior

$ cat rubocop/redundant_require_statement.rb
puts "#{$LOADED_FEATURES.grep(/pp.rb/)}, #{Array.respond_to?(:pretty_print)}"
require 'pp'
puts "#{$LOADED_FEATURES.grep(/pp.rb/)}, #{Array.respond_to?(:pretty_print)}"

$ ruby3.3 rubocop/redundant_require_statement.rb
[], false
["/opt/local/lib/ruby3.3/3.3.0/pp.rb"], true

So clearly it is necessary to load it. All the versions of Ruby I have, including 2.5 and 3.4, need it.

Actual behavior

$ bundle exec rubocop rubocop/redundant_require_statement.rb
Inspecting 1 file
E

Offenses:

rubocop/redundant_require_statement.rb:1:1: C: [Correctable] Style/FrozenStringLiteralComment: Missing frozen string literal comment.
puts "#{$LOADED_FEATURES.grep(/pp.rb/)}, #{Array.respond_to?(:pretty_print)}"
^
rubocop/redundant_require_statement.rb:2:1: E: [Correctable] Lint/RedundantRequireStatement: Remove unnecessary require statement.
require 'pp'
^^^^^^^^^^^^

1 file inspected, 2 offenses detected, 2 offenses autocorrectable

So this wrong.

I see this was already reported and fixed two years ago (#11422). So I don't know what's going on.

RuboCop version

$ bundle exec rubocop -V
1.72.2 (using Parser 3.3.7.1, rubocop-ast 1.38.0, analyzing as Ruby 3.3, running on ruby 3.3.7) [arm64-darwin24]
  - rubocop-minitest 0.37.1
  - rubocop-performance 1.24.0

[akimd]

I now realize that this cop is trying to look at the code to see if the require is needed. So the require must be "where pretty_inspect" is used, whatever that means (when it's used in many files). This goes against common practice where the requires are factored in one place.

IMHO this cop is trying too hard (or not enough) to see if it's needed (IIUC just for pp, not the others). As a consequence the safest is to disable it. Which somewhat defeats its purpose.

IOW: close this issue at will, I disabled it.