On my WooCommerce checkout the billing state / county field is incorrectly forced to “required”. I want that field to behave as truly optional for every customer, anywhere in the world, with no validation applied at all—blank is fine, any text is fine, and the order must complete without objections. Please give me a clean, update-safe solution (child-theme function or small custom plugin; no core edits) that I can drop into production and keep working through future WooCommerce and WordPress updates. I will provide staging access for testing and can verify the result on guest and logged-in checkouts once you’re done. Deliverables • Code or plugin that removes the “required” status and validation from billing_state • Short install and rollback instructions • Confirmation the fix works in standard checkout and via the REST API (create order)