Why is a self-referencing hreflang required?

I recently implemented hreflang tags in my website to tell search engines about content translations in several languages. I was very surprised to find that a self-referencing hreflang is required. Pretty much every guide I looked at had that advice.

This makes little sense to me. I'm not sure why search engines need to know about the current page in the context of hreflang. This doesn't seem to provide any additonal information to them that isn't readily available in the page already.

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Why is a self-referencing hreflang required? Question

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