This looks like a great suggestion!.
I think the proposal is about adding a mechanism to use the cc tag to attach people as reviewers, which seems good step.
I agree with @comaniac by helping the new authors finding people to tag for reviews rather than doing a mandatory review requests for many committers. Secondly, I think this is not really removing the CODEOWNERS but rather removing mandatory reviewer assignment from CODEOWNERS (maybe a text change ?). Otherwise, how would we populate the list to help new authors ?