I am spinning up a MYSQL container on a K8s cluster. The deployment yaml is as follow:

---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: {{ ca.name }}-db-mysql
  labels:
    k8s-app: {{ ca.name }}-db-mysql
spec:
  containers:
    - name: {{ ca.name }}-db-mysql
      image: "mysql:5.7.23"
      env:
        - { name: "MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD", value: "password" }
        - { name: "MYSQL_ROOT_HOST", value: "%" }
      args: ["mysqld", --default-authentication-plugin=mysql_native_password", "--sql-mode="]
      ports:
        - containerPort: 3306
      volumeMounts:
        - { mountPath: "/var/lib/mysql", name: "{{ ca.name }}-mysql", subPath: "cas/db/rca/mysqldb" }
  restartPolicy: OnFailure
  volumes:
    - name: {{ ca.name }}-mysql
      persistentVolumeClaim:
        claimName: {{ ca.name }}-mysql-volume

Despite of using MYSQL_ROOT_HOST configuration, the configured pod doesn't gets it's host configured as % for the root user.

I have to manually update the host settings to access MYSQL container outside the cluster.

kubectl exec -it ca1st-orgb-db-mysql /bin/bash
mysql -u root
SELECT host FROM mysql.user WHERE User = 'root';
CREATE USER 'root'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'root'@'%';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Why it doesn't gets configured with the default setting which is being provided in the environment variables? Could someone can share their thoughts on this.