Wrote this after shipping a page that returned 200 for every asset, reported
zero console errors, and was completely dead: a throw during setup dies inside
the custom-element boundary. Zero errors is not the same as working, so this
does not trust their absence — it looks for PRESENCE, on all five leaves, in
five steps that each name their own failure: the tag is defined, the host is in
the document, a shadowRoot is attached, it has children, it renders text.
Its first real run went red on all five, and it was right. Every gospel leaf was
dead with "Identifier 'Ge' has already been declared" — while the SRI hash
still matched and every request still returned 200. My own doing: four profiles
imported en/gospel.json directly for an English fallback, and library/i18n
already pulls that exact file in through an eager glob, so the IIFE carried two
instances of one module.
The fix is one module: library/i18n now exports EN_MESSAGES and the profiles
read it from there. The duplicate is gone.
Measured after: all five leaves mount with 3,228 to 233,307 characters of
rendered text, verify-gospel-map passes with 2,107 pins and the gap cutting to
370, and --poison confirms the check goes red on a page with no element at all.
The lesson is the gate's whole reason to exist. I had rich assertions about pin
counts and filters and none of them ran on data-tables, charts or the list, so a
bundle-level failure could take out every leaf while the one gate I did run was
pointed elsewhere. Cheap and universal beats rich and narrow for THIS question.