Contract-Neutral: Freezes mock sampler cadence only inside the existing cache regression and updates release-preflight assertions to recognize current conditional runner routing and shard-degradation behavior; runtime and public contracts are unchanged.
Change-source: pulse-maintainer
* Make release dry-run diagnostics fail closed
Select the installed Chromium project with retries disabled, replace the unconditional pass with fail-closed API and rendered-UI readiness assertions, retain actionable runtime evidence, and guard the release workflow contract against regression.
Contract-Neutral: Release diagnostic and workflow verification hardening only; no product runtime contract changes.
* Expose stable E2E failure identities
Project Playwright JUnit failures into bounded GitHub annotations so repeated stable-tier failures can be diagnosed without rerunning or weakening the gate. Keep the full reports and runtime logs as the forensic record, and cover annotation parsing and escaping with deterministic tests.
Contract-Neutral: This changes CI failure observability only and does not alter product runtime behavior, stable-tier membership, retries, or verdict semantics.
---------
Co-authored-by: rcourtman <rcourtman@users.noreply.github.com>