It called bats-assert's `fail` (not loaded in this file) → "fail: command not found"/127, masking the real reason. Emit+return instead, bump the cold-restart RPC window 60s→120s (block-index reload), and note a node mid-IBD legitimately can't serve getinfo (environmental precondition, not a product regression). Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>