This still feels like an issue with the module itself as composer require 'drupal/honeypot:^2.1' will automatically update to 2.2 which seems 2.2 should include whatever update hooks going for 2.1 to 2.2 instead of creating this error situation.
As I did not set composer to honeypot^2.2 but because of how the versioning system works composer it will automatically jump subversions. Hence my intentional comment that 2.2 should be a 3.x version as that would greatly reduce the likelihood of others have this same issue.
There is also the issue that the current composer require text for 2.1 needs to be updated to "composer require 'drupal/honeypot:2.1.4' " as the current text will not grab the 2.1 version but the 2.2 which has a high chance of creating this same issue for others.