With reference to prometheus/prometheus#9139
and my comment there prometheus/prometheus#9139 (comment)
Using a non-inverted index for out-of-line storage of long and/or high-churn Prometheus series labels
To solve the various problems around identifying string-valued labels and differentiating them from normal labels in the TSDB's inverted indexes, support would not be added for string-valued labels in normal selectors; foo{string_label_x=~"a.+"}
would find zero results if string_label_x
was a special out-of-line stored string label. Instead: