Yep, seems likely to be a puppet thing, so I moved the ticket to PUP. Henrik Lindberg for future reference, anyone can do this (I think ...): under the More drop-down there's a Move option that lets you move a ticket between Jira projects.
I can't reproduce this issue. The autorelation is ignored if the method returns nil or if the string/array of strings does not refer to a resource in the catalog. Note PUP-6321 improved checking in this area, so I'm going to mark this as a dup.