>
the white space in your patch is corrupt (it's ok on github)
I'll clean it up some way if we decide to merge it.
As for what you are missing - I'm not sure. Here's me doing the same steps (I copy-pasted your commands):
% zsh -f
% pwd
/tmp/repr
% ls -lha
total 0
drwxrwxr-x 2 pacak pacak 40 May 12 11:38 .
drwxrwxrwt 85 root root 2.2K May 12 11:39 ..
% touch 'Strategy TB' 'Strategy Scenario'
% zstyle ':completion:*' matcher-list 'm:{a-zA-Z}={A-Za-z}'
% autoload -Uz compinit && compinit -D
% ls Strategy\ t
ls: cannot access 'Strategy t': No such file or directory
% : Strategy\ t
% zsh --version
zsh 5.9 (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu)
On lines "% ls Strategy\ t" and "% : Strategy\ t" I typed "ls St<TAB>" and ": St<TAB>" respectively.
% lsb_release -a
LSB Version: n/a
Distributor ID: Fedora
Description: Fedora Linux 43 (KDE Plasma Desktop Edition)
Release: 43
Codename: n/a
% locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC=C
LC_TIME=C
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES=C
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT=C
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
I think I was able to reproduce it with the version in the git as well and I was not able to reproduce it after the patch.