Consider upgrading to a conformant, maintained, JSON Schema implementation

ajv has long been the "go-to" json schema validation implementation but more recently it seems the maintainer has focused his efforts more so on his own variation of JSON validation, JTD (JSON Type Defition, https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc8927/)

There have been few updates to the JSON Schema validation capability since 2021 and more importantly, the support for 2020-12 is still lacking functionality. This capability is vital to the development of OpenAPI 3.1.x+ tooling like Redocly. One glaring bug has been open for two years which is directly related to how the OAS 3.1.x schema is written. ajv doesn't support validation of the OAS metaschema; it fails to resolve $dynamicRef. https://github.com/ajv-validator/ajv/issues/1573

JSON Schema has recently written an implementation test suite to verify the capability of different tools in respect to the specification. You can find more information about Bowtie, here. ajv, by far, is the worst offender of the test suite.

I'm not here to dictate which implementation should be used, other than recommending a validator that conforms closer to 100% of the JSON Schema test suite.

Start by locating the repository's current ajv dependency and JSON Schema validation entry points, then compare its 2020-12 and $dynamicRef behavior with the Bowtie test suite and the linked OAS metaschema failure. Done means a maintained replacement or upgrade is selected and the relevant OpenAPI 3.1 validation behavior is confirmed.