Please note that the /{db}/_explain endpoint gained some extensions a couple of months ago to aid users in understanding the index selection logic better. This has been documented by Apache CouchDB and it should be added to the IBM Cloud documentation as well:
https://docs.couchdb.org/en/latest/api/database/find.html#index-selection
Glynn wrote a nice blog entry about the whole feature:
https://blog.cloudant.com/2024/01/17/Explaining-Explain.html