The "About" page says
The rules are configurable per game, upon every game start the clients will be notified of the current game settings.
and the server does send the settings, but the SnakeClient does not parse them. Unless the bots are to assume default values it makes sense for the observer and bots to be notified of the current settings as they are received.
I've made a commit (f99d9b1) on my own fork to fix this but as this is an API change I'm hesitant to create a PR and will let someone else figure it out.