html to epub conversion, metadata-file gets treated with tex_math_dollars

[RobertKosten]

Explain the problem.
I'm converting a bunch of HTML files with associated metadata into epubs (The real-world case is https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3098.html). I've encountered a warning that implies that pandoc is trying to apply some of the tex_math_dollars magic to the metadata-file and switching it off explicitly for the source format does not help. I assume this is not intentional, but if it is I'd like a way to turn it off, please (I'm generating the metadata files, having to guess what kind of magic I have to ward against would be a PITA ;-) ).

<h1>Hello, world!</h1>

---
title: "Example $$$$$ Example $$$$$ Example"
creator:
    - role: "author"
      text: "Robert Kosten"
...

$ ./pandoc-3.6.2/bin/pandoc -f html-tex_math_dollars -t epub --metadata-file test.yaml -o test.epub test.html 
[WARNING] Could not convert TeX math $ Example , rendering as TeX:
  $ Example 
  ^
  unexpected '$'
  expecting "%", "\\label", "\\tag", "\\nonumber", whitespace, "\\allowbreak", "\\bangle", "\\brace", "\\brack", "\\choose", "\\displaystyle", "\\textstyle", "\\scriptstyle", "\\scriptscriptstyle", "{", "\\operatorname", letter, digit, ".", "!", "'", "''", "'''", "''''", "*", "+", ",", "-", ".", "/", ":", ":=", ";", "<", "=", ">", "?", "@", "~", "_", "^", "\\left", "(", "[", "|", "\\lVert", "\\", "\\hyperref" or end of input
[WARNING] Could not convert TeX math $ Example , rendering as TeX:
  $ Example 
  ^
  unexpected '$'
  expecting "%", "\\label", "\\tag", "\\nonumber", whitespace, "\\allowbreak", "\\bangle", "\\brace", "\\brack", "\\choose", "\\displaystyle", "\\textstyle", "\\scriptstyle", "\\scriptscriptstyle", "{", "\\operatorname", letter, digit, ".", "!", "'", "''", "'''", "''''", "*", "+", ",", "-", ".", "/", ":", ":=", ";", "<", "=", ">", "?", "@", "~", "_", "^", "\\left", "(", "[", "|", "\\lVert", "\\", "\\hyperref" or end of input

Pandoc version?

$ ./pandoc-3.6.2/bin/pandoc --version
pandoc 3.6.2
Features: +server +lua
Scripting engine: Lua 5.4

[jgm]

See the documentation on --metadata-file:

string scalars in the metadata file will always be parsed as Markdown. (If the input format is Markdown or a Markdown variant, then the same variant will be used to parse the metadata file; if it is a non-Markdown format, pandoc’s default Markdown extensions will be used.)

You can backslash-escape the $s and it should be fine.